
Bonk * -^ 7 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



INTENTIONS 

THE DECAY OF LYING 
PEN PENCIL AND POISON 
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 
THE TRUTH OF MASKS 



BY 

OSCAR WILDE 



NEW YORK 
BRENTANO'S 

1905 















Copyright, 1905, by 
Brentano's 



THE DE VINNE PRESS 



INTENTIONS 



i 



L 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction vii 

The Decay of Lying . . .* i 

Pen, Pencil, and Poison 57 

The Critic as Artist, Part 1 93 

The Critic as Artist, Part II 151 

The Truth of Masks 219 



INTRODUCTION 



Paradox is never so absolutely king as when you 
try to determine the separate ways of life and of 
literature. The poet lives his life, you say, and 
that is one matter ; the poem lives its life, and that 
is quite another matter. Between the writer and 
his writings the discriminating must observe di- 
vorce. . . . Then, directly contradicting, is the 
theory of the goodly who are touched with the 
taint of Puritanism. Every written line, these hold, 
is the intimate expression of self. The sinner can- 
not write other than sinful things. 

The farther you fare, if you would reach dogma 
on this point, the deeper will you mire. Paradox 
alone rules. And rules nowhere so supremely as 
in the case of Oscar Wilde. If, on the one hand, 
we plead that it is the man's letters, not his life, that 
posterity should cherish ; on the other, it is folly for 
us to forget how completely, in Wilde, the artist 



viii INTRODUCTION 

chose life as well as letters for expressing self. 
" Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no 
less than the arts that seek to express it," wrote 
Wilde in his marvellous essay on Wainewright — 
marvellous in itself, and more so for the tragic 
thaumaturgy by which Time made of it a prophecy 
of Wilde's own fate ! — and Charles Whibley, later, 
echoed with " there is an art of life, as there are arts 
of colour, form, and speech." Yet, if we incline to 
consider Wilde as the artist in life, if we recall 
his career as aesthete, as triumphant dandy, as 
successful playwright, we have also to remember 
the tragedy, the prison, the dismal, horrid crum- 
bling to a sordid death. Inextricably mingled are 
his living and his writing; yet to consider his 
prose, his plays, his poetry, only by the light of 
his prison and its aftermath, were a.z stupid as to 
imagine that one may ever quite read any page of 
his without finding there some echo of a personahty. 
No man whose energy, whose del:Vht in a personal 
pose, and whose paradoxic inf .tuation with art 
could make such an impress on the time and the 
land he lived in can be erased by any act of his 
own, or by our volition, from the world's chronicle. 
If his triumphs were gorgeous ; if he turned the fogs 
of London into rose-gardens for his fancy; if in 
vanity and impertinence he had ruled his world as 



INTRODUCTION IX 

a monarch, dictating in taste and thought and lan- 
guage, he was to taste, later, the depths of despair, 
and pain; his soul, once so arrogant in its scorn of 
human emotion, was to suffer sorrow, and shame 
and contempt. The mood of the triumphant dandy 
we have in his earlier, that of the self-pitying suf- 
ferer, in his later writings. In life, as in letters, he 
was always the man of his mood, the artist in atti- 
tudes. One must take him, if one can, at the par- 
ticular mood that best pleases one. 

While it is my mind now to concern myself only 
with that mood of Wilde's in which he produced 
the essays in IntentionSy it was scarce possible to 
come to this without touching, however lightly, 
upon the perplexing, paradoxic problem of the 
man's life and its bearing on his art. Just as all 
his living w-.,S' a paradox, so the relation between 
that living and his writing must ever remain one. 
A month after Wilde's death, when Puritan ears 
were to all intenu closed against his name, I pub- 
lished an argumeii-i seeking to disestablish the con- 
nection between his noble artistic achievement and 
the cloud under which his name still lay. That 
was, of course, special pleading. Now, barely five 
years later. Time has nobly fulfilled all I then fore- 
cast. It takes no courage now, as then, upon the 
news of his death, to admit one's appreciation of 



X INTRODUCTION 

Oscar Wilde's artistic accomplishment. In con- 
tinental Europe no play is more frequently per- 
formed at this writing than Wilde's Salome ; his 
books and his plays are everywhere conspicuous. 
Colder critical perspective of Time and Comparison 
has not diminished the regard for his writings. 
The posthumous publication of certain prison let- 
ters of his called De Profundis tended, but the 
other day, to darken counsel somewhat. Here, 
again, was the gaping wound laid open, the tor- 
tured soul writhing to find itself amid its countless 
attitudes. Here what had been arrogance was 
turned to pity, and to a pagan, yet piteous, inter- 
pretation of the Christ ; yet here, still, was the pose, 
the attitude, the unquenchable artist in attitudes. 

Nothing, in the case before us, can be thrown 
away. It is as futile to consider the life alone as 
the letters alone. All was of a piece. Yet the 
happy mean, the discriminating way, is, having in 
mind the art his life assumed, to consider as dis- 
tinctly as possible the art he put on paper. His 
life was as complete a work of art, with heights 
and depths, triumphs and tragedies, as was ever 
composed. There, then, is one Magnum Opus. 
Some will like it, some loathe it ; some, in reading 
his written art, will like to forget his acted art, 
some will recall it gladly: you see, do what one 



INTRODUCTION XI 

will, one proceeds in circles, issuing always upon 
paradox. 

Paradox and moods,'it is always these in the case 
of Wilde. And never more so than in the case of 
his essays. His fairy tales, his poetry, notably The 
Ballad of Reading Gaol, his exquisite plays — living 
still not only in themselves, but as models to later 
playwrights — have my full meed of appreciation, 
yet it is in his essays that I find him at his best. 
Here the wisdom under his paradox is most dis- 
coverable. Here, forgetting his life, one may most 
clearly discern his most characteristic attitude 
toward life. Here, in Intentions, are the most 
precious utterances of this amateur in art and life. 
Jewels of wit and paradox are in these pages 
scattered so profusely, that if once one start to pick 
them up, one may not stop, save for sheer weari- 
ness. Truly one may declare, as William Watson 
does of Lowell, that the brilliance " is so great and 
so ubiquitous that it pays the not inconsiderable 
penalty of diverting our attention from the real 
soundness that underlies it all. So dazzling is 
the flash, and at times so sharp the report, that we 
scarcely notice the straightness of the aim." 

In that portion of the bookish world about us 
that fashions its verdicts upon academic formula the 
existence of any essayists save Lamb, Montaigne, 



Xll INTRODUCTION 

and Stevenson is slurred. Yet of essayists who have 
done memorable things, critically, in our own time, 
there are at least three : Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, 
and George Moore. All have said trenchant things 
memorably. Often impertinent, yet never negli- 
gible. Intentions is magnificent with impertinences, 
but also with truths. As a book, it has splendidly 
the sincerity '"of Wilde's insincerity. It constantly 
makes ridiculous the petty formulas of petty dog- 
matists. Observe Richard Burton, not of New 
Arabian Nights, but of New England, declaring that 
" in the essay an author stands self-revealed ; he 
may mask behind some other forms, in some mea- 
sure; but commonplaceness, vulgarity, thinness of 
nature, are in this kind instantly unccvered. The 
essay is for this reason a severe te'^t." 'In the very 
first essay in Intentions, the o- '^ entitled The Decay 
of Lying, Wilde se^ aL awry that assertion about 
the mask and what' it hides ; he declares that what 
is interesting about people " is the mask that each 
one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind 
the mask." How, before the nimbleness of this 
creature of masks and moods, can we for any length 
of time observe the stolid solemnity of the dogma- 
tists and the dealers in the sententious ? We are in 
a land of masks and moods. 

Literature is the advertisement of one's attitude 



INTRODUCTION Xlll 

toward life. It is the record of a mood. It is the 
impress, writ in wax, of some mask we wore at 
some moment. It is a quantity of conflicting things. 
It is revelation, and it is masquerade. What- 
ever it is, literature is something of which the 
essays in Intentions must ever be accounted 
types : irritating, i isincere, paradoxic, but — indubi- 
tably literature. Epigram jostles contradiction ; 
truth elbows the fantastic; paradox plays through 
every inte val ; yet these essays remain arrestingly 
entertaining, eminently readable. Upc n the style 
of Intentions there is little need to dwell ; bril- 
liant, inconsequent, mannered, it is ever the essence 
of the man himself. This style was the man ; you 
can, if you will, read him in every line of it. Here 
are all the triumphant moods of his triumphant, 
arrogant years, expressed in glittering epigram and 
luminous diction ; just as in the style of The 
Ballad of Reading Gaol you may mark the prison 
bars, and in that ot Oe Profundis you may hear 
the cry of a soul desperately at' °mpting to achieve 
sincerity through a chastened bou/. 

Every one of the essays in Intentions marks a 
happy pose. The reader here has Oscar Wilde in his 
gayest moods. There are, in this book, four essays, 
the chief of them. The Critic as Artist, being in two 
parts. Every page of them is readable. You may 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

suffer irritation, your dearest beliefs may suffer ; but 
you will read on. This is mannered matter, from a 
mannered man. But man and matter hold you to 
the end. The author's panoply of paradox guards 
him against the commonplace. Never is the reader 
safe in assuming that the brilliant manner has 
nothing behind it. Let me instance the much-dis- 
cussed theory about art imitating life, so adroitly 
set forth in the first of these essays, entitled The 
Decay of Lying. Wilde's whim, you will find, in- 
sisted upon the imitations that life gave of artistic 
inventions ; he told of English feminine beauty 
actually taking on the lines and hues first created 
by certain painters ; he told of a woman who acted 
exactly upon the Becky Sharp model ; he gave in- 
stance upon instance. Our newspapers and our ob- 
servation continually confirm the theory, at first so 
seemingly far-fetched. Sir Walter Besant, in his 
volume called The Doubts of Dives gave a trenchant 
instance in this sort of imitation. The American 
journalist, Julian Ralph, once recounted the incident 
of a model in a New York art school who absolutely, 
yet unconsciously, rehearsed the action of Du 
Maurier's heroine in suddenly refusing to pose for 
the altogether. Finally, do you recall the incident 
of Wilde's appearing before the curtain of a theatre 
where a play of his was being produced for the first 
time, and astonishing the audience with a cigarette 



INTRODUCTION XV 

in his fingers, a green carnation in his lapel ? Mr. 
Robert Hichens afterwards used the green carnation 
as the name of a satiric novelette, aimed at Wilde, 
and in the spring of this year in which I write, 1905, 
— nearly a score of years later, in other words, — a 
florist of Los Angeles, in California, succeeded in 
producing from the soil a green carnation. Who, 
after that, can quite laugh out of countenance such 
a sentence as this, from The Decay of Lying : " A 
great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, 
to reproduce it in popular form, like an enterprising 
pubHsher " ? 

The temptation to quote is hardly countered as 
one reads and rereads these essays. Even before 
we approach Wilde's lucid and yet elusive interpre- 
tation of the function of criticism, as expressed in 
The Critic as Artist , we find in the earlier essay, The 
Decay of Lyings much that bears upon this matter. 
Indeed, the effort of these pages, throughout In- 
tentions, is to build up the high estimate the world 
should give to criticism. Always, under paradox 
and contradiction, is the plea for the critic whose 
art is also creative. In The Decay of Lying Wilde 
declares that " the only portraits in which one 
believes are portraits where there is very little of 
the sitter and a great deal of the artist," and one has 
only to think of Whistler and Sargent to realise the 
germ of truth that lies here. 



XVi INTRODUCTION 

- It is in The Critic as Artist that we have Wilde 
at his best as brilliant essayist, keen, critical analyst. 
Excepting certain impudent but amusing passages 
in The Confessions of a Young Man, no phrases upon 
contemporaries are so memorable as some that Wilde 
here sets down. Mr. Henry James, we are here told, 
" writes fiction as if it were a painful duty " ; Mr. 
Hall Caine writes " at the top of his voice." Of 
Meredith he declared that "his style ischaosillumined 
by lightning As an artist he is everything ex- 
cept articulate." Browning he termed " the most 
supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have 
ever had. . . . The only man that can touch the hem 
of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a 
prose Browning, and so is Browning." He held that 
" from the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is 
a genius who drops his aspirates." For realism he 
had no phrase harsh enough; he deplored novels 
with a purpose, despised Zola, admired Balzac ; and 
summed up his theory of literature by declaring that 
it meant " distinction, charm, beauty, and imagina- 
tive power." I do not hesitate in saying that the 
function of criticism in its relation to art and life has 
never been better expressed than in this essay on 
The Critic as Artist. 

" Life itself is an art," he had written elsewhere, 
yet now, in this essay still under consideration, he 



INTRODUCTION XVll 

says that " anybody can make history. Only a 
great man can write it." But he gives you, for that, 
and countless contradictions like it, plenty of epi- 
grammatic excuse. Note this, and think of his later 
adventures in tragedy, and in pity : " The man who 
regards his past is a man who deserves to have no 
future to look forward to. When one has found ex- 
pression for a mood, one has done with it." 

Finally, there is the culminating fascination of the 
essay entitled Pen, Pencil, and Poison. This chap- 
ter on Thomas Griffiths Wainewright is one of the 
subtlest, uncanniest bits of appreciative writing in the 
history of letters. In every line of it one may read, 
recalling Wilde's subsequent career, the phrases of 
prophecy and unconscious self-revelation. It is as 
if he had, years before the event, given us a docu- 
ment that might serve as an apology or explanation. 
There is no argument that a pleader for Wilde could 
use that Wilde had not himself used here for Waine- 
wright, who was an artist, poet, dilettante, forger, and 
poisoner. Now, when one has the later documents, 
the Ballad and the letters from prison, such pas- 
sages as these, from Pen, Pe^icil, and Poison, ring 
doubly poignant : " The sentence now passed on him 
was, to a man of his culture, a form of death. . . . 
The permanence of personality is a very subtle meta- 
physical problem, and certainly the Enghsh law 



XVlll INTRODUCTION 

solves the question in an extremely rough-and- 
ready manner His crimes seem to have had 

an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong 
personality to his style. One can fancy an intense 
personality being created out of sin. The fact of a 
man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. 
The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art. 
There is no essential incongruity between crime and 
culture." There, in those words of Wilde's, written 
years before they could come to have application 
in his own case, is the expression of the vital truth 
that posterity can never blink, no matter how biassed. 
Had we before us nothing save the essay on Waine- 
wright, there would be evidence enough for calling 
Wilde a brilliant creative critic. This is biography, 
this is art. What Robert Louis Stevenson did for 
Villon, briefly, brilliantly, Oscar Wilde has here done 
for Wainewright. 

Space forbids that I dwell upon the main inter- 
pretation Wilde gives in Intentions of the theory 
of critical art. I must point you to those fascinating 
pages themselves, conscious that each line of mine 
has but delayed your coming to the feast itself. It 
is possible that this new edition of Intentions for 
which I make this intro3"uction may reach some 
who have never yet read Wilde in the essay-form. 
To them my envy goes. They will close the book. 



INTRODUCTION JCIX 

I think, upon the Wainewright essay. Unlike 
Wainewright, Wilde issued from prison gay with 
fine intentions. Brilliant still his talks, brilliant 
still his plans. Plans for new plays, great ones. 
All remained undone, unwritten. For him who 
had said one must never return to the past, there 
remained nothing but revocations from the Past. 
Gradually all deserted him : friends, his own wit, 
even the curiosity-seekers. He could no longer 
talk, no longer write. The passing of the Paris 
Exposition found him, and with it Death, with 
all his sins upon him, huddled, so to speak, with 
the memories of a splendid career, a ghastly dis- 
aster. No death in all history seems more horrid 
than this one. Beau Brummell in Calais, Verlaine 
in Paris, do not surpass this tragedy. 

The sunflowers, the lilies, the carnations, and the 
velvet are gone, yet the satire and the caricature 
they aroused remain part of our artistic treasure. 
The tinsel of aestheticism is dust, yet we are even 
now heirs to its gain in knowledge of the Japanese 
arts. The drawings of Du Maurier and Beardsley, 
the writings of Hi.chens, the words of Gilbert, all 
testify obliquely to the power of the man whose 
hell, more literally than that of any other man, was 
indeed paved with Intentions. 

Percival Pollard. 

New York, July, igo^. 



THE DECAY OF LYING 

AN OBSERVATION 



C^ DIALOGUE. Persons: 
Cyril and Vivian. Scene : the 
library of a country house in 



Nottinghamshire. 



THE DECAY OF LYING 

Cyril (coming in through the open window from the 
terrace). My dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all 
day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. 
The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods 
like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie 
on the grass, and smoke cigarettes, and enjoy Nature. 

Vivian. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I 
have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that 
Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her 
before ; that it reveals her secrets to us ; and that after 
a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things 
in her that had escaped our observation. My own 
experience is that the more we study Art, the less we 
care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is 
Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her 
extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished 
condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, 
but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them 

3 



4 INTENTIONS 

out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help 
seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, how- 
ever, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we 
should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited 
protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her 
proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, 
that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature 
herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or 
cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her. 

Cyril. Well, you need not look at the landscape. 
You can lie on the grass and smoke and talk. 

Vivian. But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is 
hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black 
insects. Why, even Morris' poorest workman could 
make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of 
Nature can. Nature pales before the furniture of "the 
street which from Oxford has borrowed its name," as 
the poet you love so much once vilely phrased it. I 
don't complain. If Nature had been comfortable, 
mankind would never have invented architecture, and 
I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel 
of theproper proportions. Everything is subordinated 
to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism 
itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of 
human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. 
Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. 
One's individuaHty absolutely leaves one. And then 



THE DECAY OF LYING 5 

Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. When- 
ever I am walking in the park here, I always feel 
that I am no more to her than the cattle that 
browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in 
the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature 
hates Mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing 
in the world, and people die of it just as they die 
of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at 
any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid 
physique as a people is entirely due to our national 
stupidity. I only hope we shall be able to keep 
this great historic bulwark of our happiness for 
many years to come; but I am afraid that we 
are beginning to be over-educated ; at least every- 
body who is incapable of learning has taken to 
teaching — that is really what our enthusiasm for 
education has come to. In the meantime, you had 
better go back to your wearisome, uncomfortable 
Nature, and leave me to correct my proofs. 

Cyril. Writing an article! That is not very con- 
sistent after what you have just said. 

Vivian. Who wants to be consistent ? The dullard 
and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out 
their principles to the bitter end of action, to the 
reductio ad ahsurduin of practice. Not I. Like 
Emerson, I write over the door of my library the 
word " Whim." Besides, my article is really a most 



6 INTENTIONS 

salutary and valuable warning. If it is attended to, 
there may be a new Renaissance of Art. 

Cyril. What is the subject? 

Vivian. I intend to call it " The Decay of Lying : 
A Protest." 

Cyril. Lying! I should have thought that our 
politicians kept up that habit. 

Vivian. I assure you that they do not. They never 
rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually 
condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How 
different from the temper of the true liar, with his 
frank, fearless statements, his superb responsibility, 
his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! 
After all, what is a fine lie ? Simply that which is its 
own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative 
to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just 
as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians 
won't do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on be- 
half of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen 
on its members. Their feigned ardours and unreal 
rhetoric are delightful. They can make the worse 
appear the better cause, as though they were fresh 
from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest 
from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal 
for their clients, even when those clients, as often 
happens, were clearly and unmistakeably innocent. 
But they are briefed by the prosaic, and are not 
ashamed to appeal to precedent. In spite of their 



THE DECAY OF LYING 7 

endeavours, the truth will out. Newspapers, even, 
have degenerated. They may now be absolutely 
relied upon. One feels it as one wades through their 
columns. It is always the unreadable that occurs. 
I am afraid that there is not much to be said in 
favour of either the lawyer or the journalist. Besides 
what I am pleading for is Lying in art. Shall I 
read you what I have written? It might do you a 
great deal of good. 

Cyril. Certainly, if you give me a cigarette. 
Thanks. By the way, what magazine do you in- 
tend it for ? 

Vivian. For the Retrospective Review. I think I 
told you that the elect had revived it. 

Cyril. Whom do you mean by " the elect " ? 

Vivian. Oh, The Tired Hedonists of course. It 
is a club to which I belong. We are supposed to 
wear faded roses in our button-holes when we 
meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian. I 
am afraid you are not eligible. You are too fond 
of simple pleasures. 

Cyril. I should be black-balled on the ground of 
animal spirits, I suppose? 

Vivian. Probably. Besides, you are little too old. 
We don't admit anybody who is of the usual age. 

Cyril. Well, I should fancy you are all a good 
deal bored with each other. 

Vivian. We are. That is one of the objects of 



8 INTENTIONS 

the club. Now, if you promise not to interrupt too 
often, I will read you my article. 

Cyril. You will find me all attention. 

Vivian (reading in a very clear, musical voice). 
" The Decay of Lying : A Protest. — One of 
the chief causes that can be assigned for the 
curiously commonplace character of most of the 
literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of 
Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. 
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in 
the form of fact ; the modern novelist presents us 
Vi^ith dull facts under the guise of fiction. The 
Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for 
method and manner. He has his tedious ' document 
humain,' his miserable little 'coin de la creation,^ into 
which he peers with his microscope. He is to be 
found at the Librairie Nationale, or at the British 
Museum, shamelessly reading up his subject. He 
has not even the courage of other people's ideas, 
but insists on going directly to life for everything, 
and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal 
experience, he comes to the ground, having 
drawn his types from the family circle or from the 
weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an 
amount of useful information from which never, 
even in his most meditative moments, can he 
thoroughly free himself. 



THE DECAY OF LYING 9 

" The loss that results to literature in general 
from this false ideal of our time can hardly be 
overestimated. People have a careless way of 
talking about a ' born liar,' just as they talk about ( 
a 'born poet' But in both cases they are wrong. \ 
Lying and poetry are arts — arts, as Plato saw, not 
unconnected with each other — and they require the 
most careful study, the most disinterested devotion. 
Indeed, they have their technique, just as the more 

i material arts of painting and sculpture have, their 
subtle secrets of form and colour, their craft-mys- 
teries, their deliberate artistic methods. As one 
knows the poet by his fine music, so one- can recog- 
nize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in 
neither case will the casual inspiration of the 
moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must 
precede perfection. But in modern days while the 
"fashion of writing poetry has become far too com- 
mon, and should, if possible, be discouraged, the 
i fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute. 
Many a young man starts in life with a natural 
gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial 
and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation 
of the best models, might grow into something 
really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he 
comes to nothing. He either falls into careless 

""Tiabifs of "accuracy " 



lO INTENTIONS 

Cyril. My dear fellow ! 

Vivian. Please don't interrupt in the middle of a 
sentence. " He either falls into careless habits of 
accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the 
aged and the well-informed. Both things are 
equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they 
would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and 
in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy 
faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all state- 
ments made in his presence, has no hesitation in 
contradicting people who are much younger than 
himself, and often ends by writing novels which are 
so like life that no one can possibly believe in their 
probability. This is no isolated instance that we 
are giving. It is simply one example out of many ; 
and if something cannot be done to check, or at 
least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art 
will become sterile and Beauty will pass away from 
the land. 

" Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that de- 
lightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is 
tainted with this modern vice, for we know posi- 
tively no other name for it. There is such a 
thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to 
make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inar- 
tistic as not to contain a single anachronism to 
boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll 



THE DECAY OF LYING II 

reads dangerously like an experiment out of 
the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who 
really has, or had once, the makings of a per- 
fectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being 
suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything 
marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal re- 
miniscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of 
cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists 
much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it 
were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives 
and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary 
style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic 
satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the 
grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. 
He is so loud that one cannot hear what he says. 
Mr. James Payn is an adept in the art of concealing 
what is not worth finding. He hunts down the obvious 
with the enthusiasm of a short-sighted detective. 
As one turns over the pages, the suspense of the 
author becomes almost unbearable. The horses of 
Mr. William Black's phaeton do not soar towards the 
sun. They merely frighten the sky at evening into 
violent chromolithographic effects. On seeing them 
approach, the peasants take refuge in dialect. Mrs. 
Oliphant prattles pleasantly about curates, lawn- 
tennis parties, domesticity, and other wearisome 
things. Mr. Marion Crawford has immolated 



12 INTENTIONS 

himself upon the altar of local colour. He 
is like the lady in the French comedy who keeps 
talking about ' le beau ciel d'ltahe.' Besides, he 
has fallen into a bad habit of uttering moral 
platitudes. He is always telling us that to be good 
is to be good, and that to be bad is to be wicked. 
At times he is almost edifying. Robert Elsmere 
is of course a masterpiece — a masterpiece of the 
' genre ennuyeux,' the one form of literature that 
the English people seem to thoroughly enjoy. A 
thoughtful young friend of ours once told us that 
it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes 
on at a meat tea in the house of a serious Noncom- 
formist family, and we can quite believe it. Indeed 
it is only in England that such a book could be 
produced. England is the home of lost ideas. As 
for that great and daily increasing school of novelists 
for whom the sun always rises in the East-End, the 
only thing that can be said about them is that they 
find life crude, and leave it raw. 

" In France, though nothing so deliberately 
tedious as Robert Elsmere has been produced, things 
are not much better. M. Guy de Maupassant, 
with his keen mordant irony and his hard vivid 
style, strips life of the few poor rags that still 
cover her, and shows us foul sore and festering 
wound. He writes lurid little tragedies in which 



THE DECAY OF LYING 1 3 

everybody is ridiculous ; bitter comedies at which one 
cannot laugh for very tears. M. Zola, true to the 
lofty principle that he lays down in one of his 
pronunciamientos on literature, ' L'homme de genie 
n'a jamais d'esprit,' is determined to show that, 
if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull. 
And how well he succeeds! He is not without 
power. Indeed at times, as in Germinal, there is 
something almost epic in his work. But his work is 
entirely wrong from beginning to end, and wrong not 
on the ground of morals, but on the ground of art. 
From any ethical standpoint it is just what it should be. 
The author is perfectly truthful, and describes things 
exactly as they happen. What more can any moral- 
ist desire? We have no sympathy at all with the 
moral indignation of our time against M. Zola. It is 
simply the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed. 
But from the standpoint of art, what can be said in 
favour of the author of U Assommoir, Nana, and 
Pot-Bouille ? Nothing. Mr. Ruskin once described 
the characters in George Eliot's novels as being like 
the sweepings of aPentonville omnibus, but M. Zola's 
characters are much worse. They have their dreary 
vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their 
lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what 
happens to them ? In literature we require distinc- 
tion, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We 



14 INTENTIONS 

don't want to be harrowed and disgusted with an 
account of the doings of the lower orders. M. Daudet 
is better. He has wit, a light touch, and an amus- 
ing style. But he has lately committed literary 
suicide. Nobody can possibly care for Delobelle 
with his *I1 faut lutter pour I'art,' or for Valmajour 
with his eternal refrain about the nightingale, or for 
the poet in Jack with, his 'mots cruels,' now that we 
have learned from Vmgt Ans de ma Vie litter aire 
that these characters were taken directly from life. 
To us they seem to have suddenly lost all their 
vitality, all the few qualities they ever possessed. 
The only real people are the people who never 
existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life 
for his personages he should at least pretend that they 
are creations, and not boast of them as copies. The 
justification of a character in a novel is not that 
other persons are what they are, but that the author 
is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of 
art. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the 'roman 
psychologique,' he commits the error of imagining that 
the men and women of modern life are capable of 
being infinitely analysed for an innumerable series of 
chapters. In point of fact what is interesting about 
people in good society — and M. Bourget rarely moves 
out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come 
to London, — is the mask that each one of them 



THE DECAY OF LYING 15 

wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask. 
It is a humiliating confession,but we are all of us made 
out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something 
of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. 
The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the 
young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where 
we differ from each other is purely in accidentals : in 
dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, per- 
sonal appearance, tricks of habit, and the like. The 
more one analyses people, the more all reasons for 
analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that 
dreadful universal thing called human nature. In- 
deed, as any one who has ever worked among the 
poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man 
is no mere poet's dream, it is a most depressing and 
humiliating reality; and if a writer insists upon 
analysing the upper classes, he might just as well 
write of match-girls and costermongers at once." 
However, my dear Cyril, I will not detain you any 
further just here. I quite admit that modern novels 
have many good points. All I insist on is that, as 
a class, they are quite unreadable. 

Cyril. That is certainly a very grave qualification, 
but I must say that I think you are rather unfair in 
some of your strictures. I like The Deemster, and The 
Daughter of Heth, and Le Disciple, and Mr. Isaacs, 
and as for Robert Elsmere I am quite devoted to it. 



l6 INTENTIONS 

Not that I can look upon it as a serious work. As a 
statement of the problems that confront the earnest 
Christian it is ridiculous and antiquated. It is simply 
Arnold's Literature and Dogma with the literature 
left out. It is as much behind the age as Paley's 
Evidences, or Colenso's method of Biblical exegesis. 
Nor could anything be less impressive than the un- 
fortunate hero gravely heralding a dawn that rose 
long ago, and so completely missing its true signifi- 
cance that he proposes to carry on the business of 
the old firm under the new name. On the other 
hand, it contains several clever caricatures, and a 
heap of delightful quotations, and Green's philoso- 
phy very pleasantly sugars the somewhat bitter pill 
of the author's fiction. I also cannot help expressing 
my surprise that you have said nothing about the 
two novelists whom you are always reading, Balzac 
and George Meredith. Surely they are realists, both 
of them? 

Vivian. Ah ! Meredith ! Who can define him ? 
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As 
awriterhehas mastered everything except language : 
as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a 
story : as an artist he is everything, except articulate. 
Somebody in Shakespeare — Touchstone, I think — 
talks about a man who is always breaking his shins 
over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might 



THE DECAY OF LYING 1 7 

serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's 
method. But whatever he is, he is not a reahst. Or 
rather I would say that he is a child of realism who 
is not on speaking terms with his father. By delib- 
erate choice he has made himself a romanticist. He 
has refused to bow the knee to Baal, and after all, 
even if the man's fine spirit did not revolt against the 
noisy assertions of realism, his style would be quite 
sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance. 
By its means he has planted round his garden a 
hedge full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses. 
As for Balzac, he was a most wonderful combination 
of the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit. 
The latter he bequeathed to his disciples : the former 
was entirely his own. The difference between such a 
book as M. Zola's U Assonimoir and Balzac's Illu- 
sions Perdues 's the difference between unimagina- 
tive realism and imaginative reality. "All Balzac's 
characters," said Baudelaire, " are gifted with the 
same ardour of life that animated himself. All his 
fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each 
mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. 
The very scullions have genius." A steady course 
of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and 
our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His 
characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured exist- 
ence. They dominate us, and defy scepticism. One 



1 8 INTENTIONS 

of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of 
Lucien de Rubempre. It is a grief from which I 
have never been able to completely rid myself. It 
haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember 
it when I laugh. But Balzac is no more a realist than 
Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it. 
I admit, however, that he set far too high a value on 
modernity of form and that, consequently, there is 
no book of his that, as an artistic masterpiece, can 
rank with Salammbo or Esmond, or The Cloister and 
the Hearth, or the Vicomte de Bragelonne. 

Cyril, Do you object to modernity of form, 
then? 

Vivian. Yes. It is a huge price to pay for a very 
poor result. Pure modernity of form is always some- 
what vulgarising. It cannot help being so. The pub- 
lic imagine that, because they are interested in their 
immediate surroundings. Art should be interested in 
them also, and should take them as her subject- 
matter. But the mere fact that they are interested 
in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for 
Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once 
said, are the things that do not concern us. As long 
as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in 
any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals 
strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the 
environment in which we live, it is outside the proper 



THE DECAY OF LYING I9 

sphere of art. To art's subject-matter we should be 
more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, 
have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feel- 
ing of any kind. It is exactly because Hecuba is 
nothing to us that her sorrows are such an admirable 
motive for a tragedy. I do not know anything in the 
whole history of literature sadder than the artistic 
career of Charles Reade. He wrote one beautiful 
book, The Cloister and the Hearth, a book as much 
above Romola as Romola is above Daniel Deronda, 
and wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to 
be modern,to draw public attention to the state of our 
convict prisons, and the management of our private 
lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing 
enough in all conscience when he tried to arouse our 
sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administra- 
tion; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man 
with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over 
the abuses of contemporary life like a common pam- 
phleteer or a sensational journaHst, is really a sight for 
the angels to weep over. Believe me, my dear Cyril, 
modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter 
are entirely and absolutely wrong. We have mis- 
taken the common livery of the age for the vesture of 
the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets 
and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should 
be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are 



20 INTENTIONS 

a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a 
mess of facts. 

Cyril. There is something in what you say, and 
there is no doubt that whatever amusement we may 
find in reading a purely modern novel, we have rarely 
any artistic pleasure in re-reading it. And this is 
perhaps the best rough test of what is Hterature and 
what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book 
over and over again, there is no use reading it at all. 
But what do you say about the return to Life and 
Nature? This is the panacea that is always being 
recommended to us. 

Vivian. I will read you what I say on that sub- 
ject. The passage comes later on in the article, but 
I may as well give it to you now : — 

" The popular cry of our time is ' Let us return to 
Life and Nature ; they will recreate Art for us, and 
send the red blood coursing through her veins ; they 
will shoe her feet with swiftness and make her hand 
strong.' But, alas! we are mistaken in our amiable 
and well-meaning efforts. Nature is always behind 
the age. And as for Life, she is the solvent that 
breaks up Art, the enemy that lays waste her 
house." 

Cyril. What do you mean by saying that Nature 
is always behind the age? 

Vivian. Well, perhaps that is rather cryptic. What 



THE DECAY OF LYING 2 1 

I mean is this. If we take Nature to mean natural 
simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture, 
the work produced under this influence is always old- 
fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. One touch of 
Nature may make the whole world kin, but two 
touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art. If, 
on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection 
of phenomena external to man, people only discover 
in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions 
of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he 
was never a lake poet. He found in stones the 
sermons he had already hidden there. He went 
moralizing about the district, but his good work was 
produced when he returned, not to Nature but to 
poetry. Poetry gave him Laodamia, and the fine 
sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is. Nature 
gave him Martha Ray and Peter Bell, and the ad- 
dress to Mr. Wilkinson's spade. 

Cyril. I think that view might be questioned. I 
am rather inclined to believe in the." impulse from a 
vernal wood," though of course the artistic value of 
such an impulse depends entirely on the kind of 
temperament that receives it, so that the return to 
Nature would come to mean simply the advance to 
a great personality. You would agree with that, I 
fancy. However, proceed with your article. 

Vivian {reading). "Art begins with abstract deco- 



22 INTENTIONS 

ration with purely imaginative and pleasurable work 
dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is 
the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with 
this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the 
charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough 
material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, 
is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, 
dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the 
impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative 
or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets 
the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilder- 
ness. This is the true decadence, and it is from this 
that we are now suffering. 

" Take the case of the English drama. At first in 
the hands of the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, 
decorative, and mythological. Then she enlisted Life 
in her service, and using some of life's external forms, 
she created an entirely new race of beings, whose 
sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has 
ever felt, whose joys were keener than lover's joys, 
who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of 
the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous 
sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them 
she gave a language different from that of actual 
use, a language full of resonant music and sweet 
rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made 
delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful 



THE DECAY OF LYING 23 

words, and enriched with lofty diction. She clothed 
her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, 
and at her bidding the antique world rose from its 
marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the 
streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute- 
led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river to 
Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape 
and substance. History was entirely rewritten, and 
there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not 
recognize that the object of Art is not simple truth 
but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly 
right. Art itself is really a form of exaggeration ; 
and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is noth- 
ing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis. 
" But Life soon shattered the perfection of the 
form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the begin- 
ning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual break- 
ing up of the blank-verse in the later plays, by the 
predominance given to prose, and by the over- im- 
portance assigned to characterisation. The passages 
in Shakespeare — and they are many — where the 
language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, 
obscene even, are entirely due to Life calHng for an 
echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention 
of beautiful style, through which alone should Life 
be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not 
by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of go- 



24 INTENTIONS 

ing directly to life, and borrowing life's natural 
utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders 
her imaginative medium she surrenders everything. 
Goethe says, somewhere — 

In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister, 

' It is in working within limits that the master re- 
veals himself,* and the limitation, the very condition 
of any art is style. However, we need not linger 
any longer over Shakespeare's realism. The Tem- 
pest is' the most perfect of palinodes. All that we 
desired to point out was, that the magnificent work 
of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained 
within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and 
that, if it drew some of its strength from using life 
as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using 
life as an artistic method. As the inevitable result of 
this substitution of an imitative for a creative me- 
dium, this surrender of an imaginative form, we have 
the modern English melodrama. The characters in 
these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would 
talk off it ; they have neither aspirations nor aspi- 
rates ; they are taken directly from life and reproduce 
its vulgarity down to the smallest detail ; they pre- 
sent the gait, manner, costume, and accent of real 
people ; they would pass unnoticed in a third-class 
railway carriage. And yet how wearisome the plays 



THE DECAY OF LYING 2$ 

are ! They do not succeed in producing even that 
impression of reality at which they aim, and which 
is their only reason for existing. As a method, real- 
ism is a complete failure. 

" What is true about the drama and the novel is no 
less true about those arts that we call the decorative 
arts. The whole history of these arts in Europe is 
the record of the struggle between Orientalism, 
with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artis- 
tic convention, its dislike to the actual representa- 
tion of any object in Nature, and our own imitative 
spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, 
as in Byzantium, Sicily, and Spain, by actual con- 
tact, or in the rest of Europe by the influence of 
the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imagina- 
tive work in which the visible things of life are 
transmuted into artistic conventions, and the things 
that Life has not are invented and fashioned for her 
delight. But wherever we have returned to Life 
and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, 
common, and uninteresting. Modern tapestry, with 
its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad 
expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious 
realism, has no beauty whatsoever. The pictorial 
glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We are 
beginning to weave possible carpets in England, 
but only because we have returned to the method 



26 INTENTIONS 

and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets of 
twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing 
truths, their inane worship of Nature, their sordid 
reproductions of visible objects, have become, even 
to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured 
Mahomedan once remarked to us, ' You Christians 
are so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth com- 
mandment that you have never thought of making 
an artistic application of the second.' He was per- 
fectly right, and the whole truth of the matter is 
this : The proper school to learn art in is not Life 
but Art." 

And now let me read you a passage which seems 
to me to settle the question very completely. 

" It was not always thus. We need not say any- 
thing about the poets, for they, with the unfortu- 
nate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have been really 
faithful to their high mission, and are universally 
recognized as being absolutely unreliable. But in 
the works of Herodotus, who, in spite of the shal- 
low and ungenerous attempts of modern sciolists to 
verify his history, may justly be called the * Father 
of Lies ' ; in the published speeches of Cicero and 
the biographies of Suetonius ; in Tacitus at his best ; 
in Pliny's Natural History; in Hanno's Periplus; 
in all the early chronicles ; in the Lives of the 
Saints ; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Mallory ; in 



THE DECAY OF LYING 2^] 

the travels of Marco Polo ; in Olaus Magnus, and 
Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his 
magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chrotticon; 
in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini ; in the 
memoirs of Casanuova; in Defoe's History of the 
Plague; in Boswell's Life of Johnson; in Napoleon's 
despatches, and in the works of our own Carlyle, 
whose French Revolution is one of the most fasci- 
nating historical novels ever written, facts are either 
kept in their proper subordinate position, or else en- 
tirely excluded on the general ground of dulness. 
Now, everything is changed. Facts are not merely 
finding a footing-place in history, but they are 
usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded 
the kingdom of Romance. Their chilling touch is 
over everything. They are vulgarising mankind. 
The crude commercialism of America, its material- 
ising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of 
things, and its lack of imagination and of high un- 
attainable ideals, are entirely due to that country 
having adopted for its national hero a man, who 
according to his own confession, was incapable of 
telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the 
story of George Washington and the cherry-tree 
has done more harm, and in a shorter space of 
time, than any other moral tale in the whole of 
literature." 



28 INTENTIONS 

Cyril. My dear boy ! 

Vivian. I assure you it is the case, and the amus- 
ing part of the whole thing is that the story of the 
cherry-tree is an absolute myth. However, you 
must not think that I am too despondent about the 
artistic future either of America or of our own 
country. Listen to this : — 

" That some change will take place before this 
century has drawn to its close we have no doubt 
whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving 
conversation of those who have neither the wit to 
exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the 
intelligent person whose reminiscences are always 
based upon memory, whose statements are invari- 
ably limited by probability, and who is at any time 
liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine 
who happens to be present, Society sooner or later 
must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fas- 
cinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever 
having gone out to the rude chase, told the won- 
dering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the 
Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper 
cave, or slain the Mammoth in single combat and 
brought back its gilded tusks, we cannot tell, and 
not one of our modern anthropologists, for all their 
much-boasted science, has had the ordinary cour- 
age to tell us. Whatever was his name or race, he 



THE DECAY OF LYING 29 

_certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. 
For the aim of the Har is simply to charm, to de- 
light, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of 
civilized society, and without him a dinner party, 
even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a 
lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate at the In- 
corporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand's far- 
cical comedies. 

" Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, 
breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run 
to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, 
knowing that he alone is in possession of the great 
secret of all her manifestations, the secret that 
Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style ; 
while Life — poor, probable, uninteresting human 
life — tired of repeating herself for the benefit of 
Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the 
compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly 
after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and 
untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks. 
" No doubt there will always be critics who, like 
a certain writer in the Saturday Review, will gravely 
censure the teller of fairy tales for his defective knowl- 
edge of natural history, who will measure imaginative 
work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, 
and will hold up their inkstained hands in horror 
if some honest gentleman, who has never been 



30 INTENTIONS 

farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens 
a fascinating book of travels like Sir John Mande- 
ville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole history 
of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever 
about the past. To excuse themselves they will try 
and shelter under the shield of him who made Pros- 
pero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel 
as his servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their 
horns round the coral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, 
and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near 
Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim proces- 
sion across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate 
in a cave with the weird sister. They will call 
upon Shakespeare — they always do — and will quote 
that hackneyed passage about Art holding the mir- 
ror up to Nature, forgetting that this unfortunate 
aphorism is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to 
convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in 
all art-matters." 

Cyril. Ahem ! Another cigarette, please. 

Vivian. My dear fellow, whatever you may say, 
it is merely a dramatic utterance, and no more rep- 
resents Shakespeare's real views upon art than the 
speeches of lago represent his real views upon 
morals. But let me get to the end of the passage : 

" Art finds her own perfection within, and not 
outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any 



THE DECAY OF LYING 3 1 

external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, 
rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no for- 
ests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. 
She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can 
draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. 
Hers are the * forms more real than living man,' 
and hers the great archetypes of which things that 
have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature 
has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She 
can work miracles at her will, and when she calls 
monsters from the deep they come. She can bid 
the almond tree blossom in winter, and send the 
snow upon the ripe cornfield. At her word the 
frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of 
June, and the winged lions creep out from the hol- 
lows of the Lydian hills. The dryads peer from 
the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns 
smile strangely at her when she comes near them. 
She has hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the 
centaurs gallop at her side." 

Cyril. I like that. I can see it. Is that the end ? 

Vivian. No. There is one more passage, but it is 
purely practical. It simply suggests some methods 
by which we could revive this lost art of Lying. 

Cyril. Well, before you read it to me, I should 
like to ask you a question. What do you mean by 
saying that life, "poor, probable, uninteresting 



32 INTENTIONS 

human life," will try to reproduce the marvels of 
art? I can quite understand your objection to art 
being treated as a mirror. You think it would re- 
duce genius to the position of a cracked looking- 
glass. But you don't mean to say that you seri- 
ously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in 
fact is the mirror, and Art the reality ? 

Vivian. Certainly I do. Paradox though it may 
seem — and paradoxes are always dangerous things 
— it is none the less true that Life imitates art far 
more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in 
our own day in England how a certain curious and 
fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised 
by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life 
that whenever one goes to a private view or to an 
artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Ros- 
setti's dream, the long ivory throat, the strange 
square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he 
so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of 
The Golden Stair, the blossom-like mouth and 
weary loveliness of the Laus Amoris, the pas- 
sion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and 
lithe beauty of the Vivien in Merlin's Dream. 
And it has always been so. A great artist invents 
a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it 
in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. 
Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England 



THE DECAY OF LYING 33 

what they have given us. They brought their 
types with them, and Life, with her keen imitative 
faculty, set herself to supply the master with 
models. The Greeks, with their quick artistic in- 
stinct, understood this, and set in the bride's cham- 
ber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she 
might bear children as lovely as the works of art 
that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. 
They knew that Life gains from Art not merely 
spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul- 
turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself 
on the very lines and colours of art and can repro- 
duce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of 
Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. 
They disliked it on purely social grounds. They 
felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they 
were perfectly right. We try to improve the con- 
ditions of the race by means of good air, free sun- 
light, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings 
for the better housing of the lower orders. But 
these things merely produce health ; they do not 
produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the 
true disciples of the great artist are not his studio- 
imitators, but those who become like his works of 
art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as 
in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best. 
Art's only pupil. 



34 INTENTIONS 

As it is with the visible arts, so it is with litera- 
ture. The most obvious and the vulgarest form in 
which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys 
who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard 
or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate 
apple-women, break into sweet-shops at night, and 
alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from 
the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, 
with black masks and unloaded revolvers. This 
interesting phenomenon, which always occurs after 
the appearance of a new edition of either of the 
books I have alluded to, is usually attributed to the 
influence of literature on the imagination. But this 
is a mistake. The imagination is essentially creative 
and always seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar 
is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative in- 
stinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is 
with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see 
in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout 
the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the 
pessimism that characterises modern thought, but 
Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad 
because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihi- 
list, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes 
to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what 
he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. 
He was invented by Tourgenieff, and completed by 



THE DECAY OF LYING 35 

Dostoieffski. Robespierre came out of the pages of 
Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out 
debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates 
life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its pur- 
pose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is 
largely an invention of Balzac. Our Luciens de 
Rubempre, our Rastignacs, and De Marsays made 
their first appearance on the stage of the Comedie 
Humaine. We are merely carrying out, with foot- 
notes and unnecessary additions, the whim or fancy 
or creative vision of a great novelist. I once asked 
a lady, who knew Thackeray intimately, whether 
he had had any model for Becky Sharp. She told 
me that Becky was an invention, but that the idea 
of the character had been partly suggested by a 
governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Ken- 
sington Square, and was the companion of a very 
selfish and rich old woman. I inquired what be- 
came of the governess, and she replied that, oddly 
enough, some years after the appearance of Vanity 
Fair, she ran away with the nephew of the lady 
with whom she was living, and ior a short time 
made a great splash in society, quite in Mrs. Raw- 
don Crawley's style, and entirely by Mrs. Rawdon 
Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, 
disappeared to the Continent, and used to be occa- 
sionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling 



36 INTENTIONS 

places. The noble gentleman from whom the same 
great sentimentalist drew Colonel Newcome died, a 
few months after The Newcomes had reached a 
fourth edition, with the word " Adsum " on his lips. 
Shortly after Mr. Stevenson published his curious 
psychological story of transformation, a friend of 
mine, called Mr. Hyde, was in the north of London, 
and being anxious to get to a railway station, took 
what he thought would be a short cut, lost his way, 
and found himself in a network of mean, evil-look- 
ing streets. Feeling rather nervous he began to 
walk extremely fast, when suddenly out of an arch- 
way ran a child right between his legs. It fell on 
the pavement, he tripped over it, and trampled upon 
it. Being of course very much frightened and a 
little hurt, it began to scream, and in a few seconds 
the whole street was full of rough people who came 
pouring out of the houses like ants. They sur- 
rounded him, and asked him his name. He was just 
about to give it when he suddenly remembered the 
opening incident in Mr. Stevenson's story. He was 
so filled with horror at having realized in his own 
person that terrible and well written scene, and at 
having done accidentally, though in fact, what the 
Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with dehberate intent, 
that he ran away as hard as he could go. He was, 
however, very closely followed, and finally he took 



THE DECAY OF LYING 37 

refuge in a surgery, the door of which happened to 
be open, where he explained to a young assistant, 
who was serving there, exactly what had occurred. 
The humanitarian crowd were induced to go away 
on his giving them a small sum of money, and as 
soon as the coast was quite clear he left. As he 
passed out, the name on the brass door-plate of the 
surgery caught his eye. It was " Jekyll." At 
least it should have been. 

Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of 
course accidental. In the following case the imita- 
tion was self-conscious. In the year 1879, just after 
I had left Oxford, I met at a reception at the house 
of one of the Foreign Ministers a woman of very 
curious exotic beauty. We became great friends, 
and were constantly together. And yet what in- 
terested most in her was not her beauty, but her 
character, her entire vagueness of character. She 
seemed to have no personality at all, but simply the 
possibility of many types. Sometimes she would 
give herself up entirely to art, turn her drawing- 
room into a studio, and spend two or three days a 
week at picture-galleries or museums. Then she 
would take to attending race-meetings, wear the 
most horsey clothes, and talk about nothing but 
betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, 
mesmerism for politics, and pohtics for the melodra- 



38 INTENTIONS 

matic excitements of philanthropy. In fact, she 
was a kind of Proteus, and as much a failure in all 
her transformations as was that wondrous sea-god 
when Odysseus laid hold of him. One day a serial 
began in one of the French magazines. At that 
time I used to read serial stories, and I well remem- 
ber the shock of surprise I felt when I came to the 
description of the heroine. She was so like my 
friend that I brought her the magazine, and she re- 
cognized herself in it immediately, and seemed fas- 
cinated by the resemblance. I should tell you, by 
the way, that the story was translated from some 
dead Russian writer, so that the author had not 
taken his type from my friend. Well, to put the 
matter briefly, some months afterwards I was in 
Venice, and finding the magazine in the reading- 
room of the hotel, I took it up casually to see what 
had become of the heroine. It was a most piteous 
tale, as the girl had ended by running away with a 
man absolutely inferior to her, not merely in social 
station, but in character and intellect also. I wrote 
to my friend that evening about my views on John 
Bellini, and the admirable ices at Florio's, and the 
artistic value of gondolas, but added a postscript 
to the effect that her double in the story had be- 
haved in a very silly manner. I don't know why I 
added that, but I remember I had a sort of dread 



THE DECAY OF LYING 39 

over me that she might do the same thing. Before 
my letter had reached her, she had run away with 
a man who deserted her in six months. I saw her 
in 1884 in Paris, where she was Hving with her 
mother, and I asked her whether the story had had 
anything to do with her action. She told me that 
she had felt an absolutely irresistible impulse 
to follow the heroine step by step in her strange 
and fatal progress, and that it was with a feeling of 
real terror that she had looked forward to the last 
few chapters of the story. When they appeared, 
it seemed to her that she was compelled to repro- 
duce them in life, and she did so. It was a most 
clear example of this imitative instinct of which I 
was speaking, and an extremely tragic one. 

However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon 
individual instances. Personal experience is a most 
vicious and limited circle. All that I desire to point 
out is the general principle that Life imitates Art 
far more than Art imitates Life, and I feel sure that 
if you think seriously about it you will find that it 
is true. Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either 
reproduces some strange type imagined by painter 
or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed 
in fiction. Scientifically speaking, the basis of life — 
the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it — is 
simply the desire for expression, and Art is always 



40 INTENTIONS 

presenting various forms through which this ex- 
pression can be attained. Life seizes on them and 
uses them, even if they be to her own hurt. Young 
men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, 
have died by their own hand because by his own 
hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the 
imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation 
of Caesar. 

Cyril. The theory is certainly a very curious one, 
but to make it complete you must show that Nature, 
no less than Life, is an imitation of Art. Are you 
prepared to prove that? 

Vivian. My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove 
anything. 

Cyril. Nature follows the landscape painter then, 
and takes her effects from him? 

Vivian. Certainly. Where, if not from the Im- 
pressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs 
that come creeping down our streets, blurring the 
gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous 
shadows ? To whom, if not to them and their master, 
do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our 
river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved 
bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary 
change that has taken place in the climate of London 
during the last ten years is entirely due to this 
particular school of Art. You smile. Consider the 



THE DECAY OF LYING 41 

matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of 
view, and you will find that I am right. For what 
is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has 
borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain 
that she quickens to life. Things are because we 
see them, and what we see, and how we see it, 
depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To 
look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. 
One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. 
Then, and then only, does it come into existence. 
At present, people see fogs, not because there are 
fogs, but because poets and painters have taught 
them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. 
There may have been fogs for centuries in London. 
I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and 
so we do not know anything about them. They 
did not exist till Art had invented them. Now, it 
must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They 
have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and 
the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull 
people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an 
effect, the uncultured catch cold. And so, let us be 
humane, and invite Art to turn her wonderful eyes 
elsewhere. She has done so already, indeed. That 
white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, 
with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless 
violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and, on the whole, 



42 INTENTIONS 

Nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she 
used to give us Corots and Daubignys, she gives us 
now exquisite Monets and entrancing Pisaros. In- 
deed there are moments, rare, it is true, but still to 
be observed from time to time, when Nature becomes 
absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to 
be rehed upon. The fact is that she is in this un- 
fortunate position. Art creates an incomparable 
and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to 
other things. Nature, upon the other hand, for- 
getting that imitation can be made the sincerest 
form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until 
we all become absolutely wearied of it. Nobody 
of any real culture, for instance, ever talks now-a- 
days about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are 
quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when 
Turner was the last note in art. To admire them 
is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. 
Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday even- 
ing Mrs. Arundel insisted on my coming to the 
window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she 
called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one 
of those absurdly pretty Philistines, to whom one can 
deny nothing. And what was it ? It was simply a 
very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, 
with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and 
over-emphasized. Of course, I am quite ready to 



THE DECAY OF LYING 43 

admit that Life very often commits the same error. 
She produces her false Renes and her sham Vautrins, 
just as Nature gives us, on one day a doubtful Cuyp, 
and on another a more than questionable Rousseau. 
Still, Nature irritates one more when she does things 
of that kind. It seems so stupid, so obvious, so un- 
necessary. A false Vautrin might be delightful. A 
doubtful Cuyp is unbearable. However, I don't 
want to be too hard on Nature. I wish the Channel, 
especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often 
like a Henry Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights, 
but then, when Art is more varied, Nature will, no 
doubt, be more varied also. That she imitates Art, 
I don't think even her worst enemy would deny 
now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch 
with civilized man. But have I proved my theory 
to your satisfaction ? 

Cyril. You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, 
which is better. But even admitting this strange 
imitative instinct in Life and Nature, surely you 
would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper 
of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social 
conditions that surround it, and under whose influ- 
ence it is produced. 

Vivian. Certainly not ! Art never expresses any- 
thing but itself. This is the principle of my new 
aesthetics ; and it is this, more than that vital con- 



44 INTENTIONS 

nection between form and substance, on which Mr. 
Pater dwells, that makes music the type of all the 
arts. Of course, nations and individuals, with that 
healthy, natural vanity which is the secret of exist- 
ence, are always under the impression that it is of 
them that the Muses are talking, always trying to 
find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some 
mirror of their own turbid passions, always forget- 
ting that the singer of Life is not Apollo, but 
Marsyas. Remote from reality, and with her eyes 
turned away from the shadows of the cave. Art re- 
veals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd 
that watches the opening of the marvellous, many- 
petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is 
being told to it, its own spirit that is finding ex- 
pression in a new form. But it is not so. The 
highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, 
and gains more from a new medium or a fresh 
material than she does from any enthusiasm for 
art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great 
awakening of the human consciousness. She de- 
velops purely on her own lines. She is not sym- 
bolic of any age. It is the ages that are her sym- 
bols. 

Even those who hold that Art is representative of 
time and place and people, cannot help admitting 
that the more imitative an art is, the less it repre- 



THE DECAY OF LYING 45 

sents to us the spirit of its age. The evil faces of 
the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul 
porphyry and spotted jasper in which the realistic 
artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy 
that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we 
can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. But 
it was not so. The vices of Tiberius could not de- 
stroy that supreme civilization, any more than the 
virtues of the Antonines could save it. It fell for 
other, for less interesting reasons. The sibyls and 
prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to in- 
terpret for some that new birth of the emancipated 
spirit that we call the Renaissance ; but what do the 
drunken boors and brawling peasants of Dutch art 
tell us about the great soul of Holland ? The more 
abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals 
to us the temper of its age. If we wish to under- 
stand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its 
architecture or its music. 

Cyril. I quite agree with you there. The spirit 
of an age may be best expressed in the abstract 
ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal. 
Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an 
age, for its look, as the phrase goes, we must of 
course go to the arts of imitation. 

Vivian. I don't think so. After all, what the 
imitative arts really give us are merely the various 



46 INTENTIONS 

styles of particular artists, or of certain schools of 
artists. Surely you don't imagine that the people of 
the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the 
figures on mediaeval stained glass or in mediaeval 
stone and wood carving, or on mediaeval metal- 
work, or tapestries, or illuminated MSS. They were 
probably very ordinary-looking people, with noth- 
ing grotesque, or remarkable, or fantastic in their 
appearance. The Middle Ages, as we know them 
in art, are simply a definite form of style, and there 
is no reason at all why an artist with this style 
should not be produced in the nineteenth century. 
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. 
If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take 
an example from our own day. I know that 
you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you 
really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are 
presented to us in art, have any existence ? If you 
do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. 
The Japanese people are the deliberate self-con- 
scious creation of certain individual artists. If you 
set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the 
great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentle- 
man or lady, you will see that there is not the 
slightest resemblance between them. The actual 
people who live in Japan are not unhke the general 
i-un of Enghsh people ; that is to say, they are ex- 



THE DECAY OF LYING 47 

tremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or 
extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of 
Japan is a pure invention. There is no such coun- 
try, there are no such people. One of our most 
charming painters went recently to the Land of the 
Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the 
Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of 
painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He 
was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his 
delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell's Gal- 
lery showed only too well. He did not know that 
the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a 
mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, 
if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not 
behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the con- 
trary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in 
the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when 
you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and 
caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will 
go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down 
Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Jap- 
anese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. 
Or, to return again to the past, take as another in- 
stance the ancient Greeks. Do you think that 
Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people 
were like? Do you believe that the Athenian 
women were like the stately dignified figures of the 



48 INTENTIONS 

Parthenon frieze, or like those marvellous goddesses 
who sat in the triangular pediments of the same 
building? If you judge from the art, they cer- 
tainly were so. But read an authority, like Aris- 
tophanes for instance. You will find that the 
Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled 
shoes, died their hair yellow, painted and rouged 
their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashion- 
able or fallen creature of our own day. The fact is 
that we look back on the ages entirely through the 
medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never 
once told us the truth. 

Cyril. But modern portraits by English painters, 
what of them ? Surely they are like the people they 
pretend to represent? 

Vivian. Quite so. They are so like them that a 
hundred years from now no one will believe in them. 
The only portraits in which one believes are por- 
traits where there is very little of the sitter and a very 
great deal of the artist. Holbein's drawings of the 
men and women of his time impress us with a sense 
of their absolute reality. But this is simply because 
Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions, to 
restrain itself within his limitations, to reproduce his 
type, and to appear as he wished it to appear. It is 
style that makes us believe in a thing — nothing but 
style. Most of our modern portrait painters are 



THE DECAY OF LYING 49 

doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint 
what they see. They paint what the public sees, 
and the public never sees anything. 

CyriL Well, after that I think I should like to hear 
the end of your article. 

Vivian. With pleasure. Whether it will do any 
good I really cannot say. Ours is certainly the dull- 
est and most prosaic century possible. Why, even 
Sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates 
of ivory, and opened the gates of horn. The dreams 
of the great middle classes of this country, as re- 
corded in Mr. Myers's two bulky volumes on the sub- 
ject and in the Transactions of the Psychical Society, 
are the most depressing things that I have ever read. 
There is not even a fine nightmare among them. 
They are commonplace, sordid, and tedious. As for 
the Church I cannot conceive anything better for the 
culture of a country than the presence in it of a 
body of men whose duty it is to believe in the super- 
natural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive 
that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the 
imagination. But in the English Church a man suc- 
ceeds, not through his capacity for behef but through 
his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only Church 
where the sceptic stands at the altar, and where St. 
Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a 
worthy clergyman, who passes his life in admirable 



50 INTENTIONS 

works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and 
unknown; but it is sufficient for some shallow un- 
educated passman out of either University to get up 
in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah's 
ark, or Balaam's ass, or Jonah and the whale, for 
half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit open- 
mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. 
The growth of common sense in the English Church 
is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a 
degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is 
silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of 
psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but 
man can never believe the improbable. However, 
I must read the end of my article : — 

" What we have to do, what at any rate it is our 
duty to do, is to revive this old art of Lying. Much 
of course may be done, in the way of educating the 
public, by amateurs in the domestic circle, at literary 
lunches, and at afternoon teas. But this is merely 
the light and graceful side of lying, such as was pro- 
bably heard at Cretan dinner parties. There are 
many other forms. Lying for the sake of gaining 
some immediate personal advantage, for instance — 
lying with a moral purpose, as it is usually called — 
though of late it has been rather looked down upon, 
was extremely popular with the antique world. 
Athena laughs when Odysseus tells her ' his words 



THE DECAY OF LYING 5 1 

of sly devising,' as Mr. William Morris phrases it, 
and the glory of mendacity illumines the pale brow 
of the stainless hero of Euripidean tragedy, and sets 
among the noble women of the past the young bride 
of one of Horace's most exquisite odes. Later on, 
what at first had been merely a natural instinct was 
elevated into a self-conscious science. Elaborate 
rules were laid down for the guidance of mankind, 
and an important school of literature grew up round 
the subject. Indeed, when one remembers the excel- 
lent philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole 
question one cannot help regretting that no one has 
ever thought of publishing a cheap and condensed 
edition of the works of that great casuist. A short 
primer, ' When to Lie and How,' if brought out in 
an attractive and not too expensive a form, would no 
doubt command a large salej and would prove of 
real practical service to many earnest and deep- 
thinking people. Lying for the sake of the improve- 
ment of the young, which is the basis of home educa- 
tion, still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so 
admirably set forth in the early books of Plato's Re- 
public that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here. 
It is a mode of lying for which all good mothers have 
peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further 
development, and has been sadly overlooked by the 
School Board. Lying for the sake of a monthly sal- 



52 INTENTIONS 

ary is of course well known in Fleet Street, and the 
profession of a political leader-writer is not without 
its advantages. But it is said to be a somewhat dull 
occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much 
beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity. |' The only 
form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is 
Lying for its own sake, and the highest development 
of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in 
Art. i Just as those who do not love Plato more than 
Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the 
Academe, so those who do not love Beauty more 
than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art. The 
solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands 
like the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and 
fantasy La Chimere, dances round it, and calls to it 
with her false, flute-toned voice. It may not hear 
her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored 
to death with the commonplace character of modern 
fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her 
wings. 

" And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how 
joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as 
discreditable. Truth will be found mourning over her 
fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, 
will return to the land. The very aspect of the 
world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the 
sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round 



THE DECAY OF LYING 53 

the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delight- 
ful maps of those ages when books on geography 
were actually readable. Dragons will wander about 
the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her 
nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands 
upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's head. 
Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand 
in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue 
Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of 
things that are lovely and that never happened, of 
things that are not and that should be. But before 
this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of 
Lying." ^ 

Cyril. Then we must certainly cultivate it at once. 
But in order to avoid making any error I want you to 
tell me briefly the doctrines of the new aesthetics. 

Vivian. Briefly, then, they are these. Art never 
expresses anything but itself. It has an independ- 
ent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on 
its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an 
age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So 
far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in 
direct opposition to it, and the only history that it 
preserves for us is the history of its own progress. 
Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps, and revives 
some antique form, as happened in the archaistic 
movement of late Greek Art, and in the pre-Ra- 



54 INTENTIONS 

phaelite movement of our own day. At other times 
it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one 
century work that it takes another century to under- 
stand, to appreciate, and to enjoy. In no case does 
it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time 
to the time itself is the great mistake that all his- 
torians commit. 

The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes 
from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating 
them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes 
be used as part of Art's rough material, but before 
they are of any real service to art they must be 
translated into artistic conventions. The moment 
Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders 
everything. As a method Realism is a complete 
failure, and the two things that every artist should 
avoid are modernity of form and modernity of 
subject-matter. To us, who live in the nineteenth 
century, any century is a suitable subject for art 
except our own. The only beautiful things are the 
things that do not concern us. It is, to have the 
pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba 
is nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a 
motive for a tragedy. Besides, it is only the modern 
that ever becomes old-fashioned. M. Zola sits down 
to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who 
cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of 



THE DECAY OF LYING 55 

date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism 
is always in front of Life. 

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far 
more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely 
from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that 
the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, 
and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through 
which it may realize that energy. It is a theory 
that has never been put forward before, but it is 
extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light 
upon the history of Art. 

It follows, as a corollary from this, that external 
Nature also imitates Art. The only effects that she 
can show us are effects that we have already seen 
through poetry, or in paintings. This is the secret 
of Nature's charm, as well as the explanation of 
Nature's weakness. 

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of 
beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. 
But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient 
length. And now let us go out on the terrace, 
where "droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost," 
while the evening star " washes the dusk with silver." 
At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive 
effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps 
its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the 
poets. Come! We have talked long enough. 



PEN PENCIL AND POISON 

A STUDY IN GREEN 



PEN PENCIL AND POISON 

It has constantly been made a subject of reproach 
against artists and men of letters that they are lack- 
ing in wholeness and completeness of nature. As 
a rule this must necessarily be so. That very con- 
centration of vision and intensity of purpose which 
is the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in 
itself a mode of limitation. To those who are pre- 
occupied with the beauty of form nothing else seems 
of much importance. Yet there are many excep- f 
tions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, 
and Goethe as state councillor, and Milton as Latin 
secretary to Cromwell. Sophocles held civic office in 
his own city ; the humourists, essayists, and novelists 
of modern America seem to desire nothing better 
than to become the diplomatic representatives of 
their country ; and Charles Lamb's friend, Thomas 
GriffithsWainewright, the subject of this brief memoir, 
though of an extremely artistic temperament, fol- 

59 



6o INTENTIONS 

lowed many masters other than art, being not 
merely a poet and a painter and an art-critic, an 
antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of 
beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delight- 
ful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capa- 
bihties, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost 
without rival in this or any age. 

This remarkable man, so powerful with "pen, 
pencil, and poison," as a great poet of our own day 
has finely said of him, was born at Chiswick, in 1794. 
His father was the son of a distinguished solicitor of 
Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden. His mother was 
the daughter of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths, the 
editor and founder of the Monthly Review, the 
partner in another literary speculation of Thomas 
Davies, that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said 
that he was not a bookseller, but " a gentleman who 
dealt in books," the friend of Goldsmith and Wedg- 
wood, and one of the. most well-known men of his 
day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him birth, 
at the early age of twenty-one, and an obituary 
notice in the Gentleman' s Magazine tells us of her 
" amiable disposition and numerous accomplish- 
ments," and adds somewhat quaintly that " she is 
supposed to have understood the writings of Mr. 
Locke as well as perhaps any person of either sex 
now living." His father did not long survive his 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 6 1 

young wife, and the little child seems to have been 
brought up by his grandfather, and, on the death 
of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George Edward 
Grififiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. His 
boyhood was passed at Linden House, Turnham 
Green, one of those many fine Georgian mansions 
that have unfortunately disappeared before the in- 
roads of the suburban builder, and to its lovely 
gardens and well- timbered park he owed that simple 
and impassioned love of nature which never left him 
all through his life, and which made him so peculiarly 
susceptible to the spiritual influences 6i Words- 
worth's poetry. He went to school at Charles 
Burney's academy at Hammersmith. Mr. Burney 
was the son of the historian of music, and the near 
kinsman of the artistic lad who was destined to turn 
out his most remarkable pupil. He seems to have 
been a man of a good deal of culture, and in after 
years Mr. Wainewright often spoke of him with much 
affection as a philosopher, an archaeologist, and an 
admirable teacher who, while he valued the in- 
tellectual side of education, did not forget the im- 
portance of early moral training. It was under Mr. 
Burney that he first developed his talent as an artist, 
and Mr. Hazlitt tells us that a drawing book which 
he used at school is still extant, and displays great 
talent and natural feeling. Indeed, painting was 



62 INTENTIONS 

the first art that fascinated him. It was not till 
much later that he sought to find expression by pen 
or poison. 

Before this, however, he seems to have been car- 
ried away by boyish dreams of the romance and 
chivalry of a soldier's life, and to have become a 
young guardsman. But the reckless dissipated life 
of his companions failed to satisfy the refined ar- 
tistic temperament of one who was made for other 
things. In a short time he wearied of the service. 
" Art," he tells us, in words that still move many 
by their ardent sincerity and strange fervour, "Art 
touched her renegade; by her pure and high in- 
fluences the noisome mists were purged ; my feel- 
ings, parched, hot, and tarnished, were renovated 
with cool, fresh bloom, simple, beautiful to the 
simple-hearted." But Art was not the only cause 
of the change. "The writings of Wordsworth," he 
goes on to say, " did much towards calming the 
confusing whirl necessarily incident to sudden mu- 
tations. I wept over them tears of happiness and 
gratitude." He accordingly left the army, with its 
rough barrack-life and coarse mess-room tittle-tattle, 
and returned to Linden House, full of this new- 
born enthusiasm for culture. A severe illness, in 
which, to use his own words, he was " broken like 
a vessel of clay," prostrated him for a time. His 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 63 

delicately strung organization, however indifferent 
it might have been to inflicting pain on others, was 
itself most keenly sensitive to pain. He shrank 
from suffering as a thing that mars and maims 
human life, and seems to have wandered through 
that terrible valley of melancholia from which so 
many great, perhaps greater, spirits have never 
emerged. But he was young — only twenty-five 
years of age — and he soon passed out of the " dead 
black waters," as he called them, into the larger 
air of humanistic culture. As he was recovering 
from the illness that had led him almost to the 
gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up 
literature as an art. " I said with John Woodvill," 
he cries, " it were a life of gods to dwell in such an 
element," to see, and hear, and write brave 
things : — 

" These high and gusty reHshes of life 
Have no allayings of mortahty." 

It is impossible not to feel that in this passage 
we have the utterance of a man who had a true 
passion for letters. " To see, and hear, and write 
brave things," this was his aim. 

Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, struck 
by the young man's genius, or under the influence 
of the strange fascination that he exercised on every 



64 INTENTIONS 

one who knew him, invited him to write a series of 
articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of 
fanciful pseudonyms he began to contribute to the 
literature of his day. Janus Weathercock, Egomet 
Bonmoty and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the 
grotesque masks under which he chose to hide his 
seriousness, or to reveal his levity. A mask tells 
us more than a face. These disguises intensified 
his personality. In an incredibly short time he 
seems to have made his mark. Charles Lamb 
speaks of " kind, light-hearted Wainewright," 
whose prose is " capital." We hear of him enter- 
taining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, 
Sir Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and 
others, at a petit-diner. Like Disraeli, he deter- 
mined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beau- 
tiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his 
pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, 
and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the 
signs of a new manner in literature : while his rich 
curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands 
gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction 
of being different from others. There was some- 
thing in him of Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre. At 
times he reminds us of JuHen Sorel. De Quincy 
saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles 
Lamb's. " Amongst the company, all literary 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 65 

men, sat a murderer," he tells us, and he goes on 
to describe how on that day he had been ill, and 
had hated the face of man and woman, and yet 
found himself looking with intellectual interest 
across the table at the young writer beneath whose 
affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie 
so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on 
" what sudden growth of another interest," would 
have changed his mood, had he known of what 
terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much 
attention was even then guilty. 

His life-work falls naturally under the three heads 
suggested by Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly 
admitted that, if we set aside his achievements in 
the sphere of poison, what he has actually left to us 
hardly justifies his reputation. 

But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to 
estimate a personality by the vulgar test of produc- 
tion. This young dandy sought to be somebody, 
rather than to do something. He recognized that 
Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no 
less than the arts that seek to express it. Nor is 
his work without interest. We hear of William 
Blake stopping in the Royal Academy before one 
of his pictures and pronouncing it to be " very 
fine." His essays are prefiguring of much that has 
since been realized. He seems to have anticipated 



66 INTENTIONS 

some of those accidents of modern culture that are 
regarded by many as true essentials. He writes 
about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the 
Italian Renaissance. He loves Greek gems, and 
Persian carpets, and Elizabethan translations oi Cupid 
and Psyche, and the Hypnerotomachia, and book- 
bindings, and early editions, and wide-margined 
proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of 
beautiful surroundings, and never wearies of de- 
scribing to us the rooms in which he lived, or 
would have liked to live. He had that curious love 
of green, which in individuals is always the sign of 
a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said 
to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. 
Like Baudelaire, he was extremely fond of cats, and 
with Gautier, he was fascinated by that "sweet 
marble monster" of both sexes that we can still see 
at Florence and in the Louvre. 

There is of course much in his descriptions, and 
his suggestions for decoration, that shows that he 
did not entirely free himself from the false taste 
of his time. But it is clear that he was one of the 
first to recognize what is, indeed, the very keynote 
of aesthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony 
of all really beautiful things irrespective of age or 
place, of school or manner. He saw that in deco- 
rating a room, which is to be, not a room for show. 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 6^ 

but a room to live in, we should never aim at any 
archaeological reconstruction of the past, nor burden 
ourselves with any fanciful necessity for historical 
accuracy. In this artistic perception he was per- 
fectly right. All beautiful things belong to the 
same age. 

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we 
find the delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its 
exquisitely painted figures and the faint KAAOS 
finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an 
engraving of the " Delphic Sibyl " of Michael 
Angelo, or of the '* Pastoral " of Giorgione. Here 
is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude 
lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table 
lies a book of Hours " cased in a cover of solid silver 
gilt, wrought with quaint devices and studded with 
small brilliants and rubies," and close by it " squats 
a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the 
sunny fields of corn-bearing Sicily." Some dark 
antique bronzes contrast "with the pale gleam of 
two noble Christi Crucifixi, one carved in ivory, 
the other moulded in wax." He has his trays of 
Tassie's gems, his tiny Louis- Quatorze bonbonniere 
with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized 
"brown-biscuit teapots, filagree- worked, "his citron 
morocco letter-case, and his " pomona-green " 
chair. 



68 INTENTIONS 

One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his 
books and casts and engravings, a true virtuoso, a 
subtle connoisseur, turning over his fine collection 
of Marc Antonios, and his Turner's " Liber Stu- 
diorum," of which he was a warm admirer, or ex- 
amining with a magnifier some of his antique gems 
and cameos, " the head of Alexander on an onyx of 
two strata," or that superb altissimo relievo on cor- 
nelian, Jupiter ^Egiochus." He was always a great 
amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful 
suggestions as to the best means of forming a col- 
lection. Indeed, while fully appreciating m^odern 
art, he never lost sight of the importance of repro- 
ductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and 
all that he says about the value of plaster casts is 
quite admirable. 

As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily 
with the complex impressions produced by a work 
of art, and certainly the first step in aesthetic criti- 
cism is to realize one's own impressions. He cared 
nothing for abstract discussions on the nature of the 
Beautiful, and the historical method, which^has since 
yielded such rich fruit, did not belong to his day, 
but he never lost sight of the great truth that Art's 
first appeal is neither to the intellect nor to the emo- 
tions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and he 
niore than once points out that this temperament, 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 69 

this "taste," as he calls it, being unconsciously guided 
and made perfect by frequent contact with the best 
work, becomes in the end a form of right judgment. 
Of course there are fashions in art just as there are 
fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever 
quite free ourselves from the influence of custom 
and the influence of novelty. He certainly could 
not, and he frankly acknowledges how difficult it is 
to form any fair estimate of contemporary work. 
But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound. 
He admired Turner and Constable at a time when 
they were not so much thought of as they are now, 
and saw that for the highest landscape art we re- 
quire more than " mere industry and accurate tran- 
scription." Of Crome's " Heath Scene near Nor- 
wich " he remarks that it shows " how much a 
subtle observation of the elements, in their wild 
moods, does for a most uninteresting flat," and of 
the popular type of landscape of his day he says 
that is " simply an enumeration of hill and dale, 
stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages, 
and houses ; little more than topography, a kind of 
pictorial map-work; in which rainbows, showers, 
mists, haloes, large beams shooting through rifted 
clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued mate- 
rials of the real painter, are not." He had a thor 
ough dislike of what is obvious or commonplace in 



JO INTENTIONS 

art, and while he was charmed to entertain Wilkie 
at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David's pictures 
as he did for Mr. Crabbe's poems. With the imi- 
tative and realistic tendencies of his day he had no 
sympathy, and he tells us frankly that his great 
admiration for Fuseli was largely due to the fact 
that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary 
that an artist should only paint what he sees. The 
qualities that he sought for in a picture were com- 
position, beauty and dignity of line, richness of 
colour, and imaginative power. Upon the other 
hand, he was not a doctrinaire. " I hold that no 
work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws de- 
duced from itself: whether or not it be consistent 
with itself is the question." This is one of his ex- 
cellent aphorisms. And in criticising painters so 
different as Landseer and Martin, Stothard and 
Etty, he shows that, to use a phrase now classical, 
he is trying " to see the object as in itself it 
really is." 

However, as I pointed out before, he never feels 
quite at his ease in his criticisms of contemporary 
work. " The present," he says, " is about as agree- 
able a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first peru- 
sal. . . . Modern things dazzle me. I must look 
at them through Time's telescope. Ella complains 
that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain ; 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 7 1 

'print,' as he excellently says, 'settles it.' Fifty 
years' toning does the same thing to a picture." 
He is happier when he is writing about Watteau 
and Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about 
Rembrandt, Correggio and Michael Angelo ; hap- 
piest of all when he is writing about Greek things. 
What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical 
art and the art of the Renaissance were always dear 
to him. He saw what our English school could 
gain from a study of Greek models, and never 
wearies of pointing out to the young student the 
artistic possibilities that lie dormant in Hellenic 
marbles and Hellenic methods of work. In his 
judgments on the great Italian Masters, says De 
Quincey, " There seemed a tone of sincerity and 
of native sensibility, as in one who spoke for him- 
self, and was not merely a copier from books." 
The highest praise that we can give to him is that 
he tried to revive style as a conscious tradition. But 
he saw that no amount of art-lectures or art con- 
gresses, or " plans for advancing the fine arts," will 
ever produce this result. The people, he says very 
wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, 
must always have " the best models constantly 
before their eyes." 

As is to be expected from one who was a 
painter, he is often extremely technical in his art 



^2 INTENTIONS 

criticisms. Of Tintoret's "St. George delivering 
the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon " he re- 
marks : — 

"The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is 
relieved from the pale greenish background by a vermilion 
scarf; and the full hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it 
were, in a lower key by the purple-lake coloured stuffs and 
bluish iron armour of the saint, besides an ample balance to 
the vivid azure drapery on the foreground in the indigo 
shades of the wild wood surrounding the castle." 

And elsewhere he talks learnedly of " a delicate 
Schiavone, various as a tulip-bed, with rich broken 
tints," of " a glowing portrait, remarkable for mor- 
bidezza, by the scarce Moroni," and of another pic- 
ture being " pulpy in the carnations." 

But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of 
the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate 
those impressions into words, to give, as it were, 
the literary equivalent for the imaginative and men- 
tal effect. He was one of the first to develop what 
has been called the art-literature of the nineteenth 
century, that form of literature which has found in 
Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Browning its two most perfect 
exponents. His description of Lancret's Repas 
Italien, in which " a dark-haired girl, ' amorous of 
mischief,' lies on the daisy-powdered grass," is in 
some respects very charming. Here is his account 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 73 

of "The Crucifixion," by Rembrandt. It is ex- 
tremely characteristic of his style: — 

''Darkness — sooty, portentous darkness — shrouds the 
whole scene: only above the accursed wood, as if through a 
horrid rift in the murky ceiling, a rainy deluge — ' sleety- 
flaw, discoloured water ' — streams down amain, spreading a 
grisly spectral light, even more horrible than that palpable 
night. Already the Earth pants thick and fast ! the dark- 
ened Cross trembles ! the winds are dropt — the air is stag- 
nant — a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and 
some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The 
horses snuff the coming terror, and become unmanageable 
through fear. The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly 
torn asunder by His own weight, fainting with loss of blood, 
which now runs in narrower rivulets from His slit veins. His 
temples and breast drowned in sweat, and His black tongue 
parched with the fiery death-fever, Jesus cries, ' I thirst.' 
The deadly vinegar is elevated to Him. 

" His head sinks, and the sacred corpse 'swings sense- 
less of the cross.' A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer 
through the air and vanishes ; the rocks of Carmel and 
Lebanon cleave asunder ; the sea rolls on high from the 
sands its black weltering waves. Earth yawns, and the 
graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the living are 
mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry through 
the holy city. New prodigies await them there. The veil 
of the temple — the unpierceable veil — is rent asunder from 
top to bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the 
Hebrew mysteries — the fatal ark with the tables and seven- 
branched candelabrum — is disclosed by the light of unearthly 
flames to the God-deserted multitude. 

" Rembrandt never /«/«/^</ this sketch, and he was quite 
right. It would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that 



74 INTENTIONS 

perplexing veil of indistinctness which affords such ample 
range wherein the doubting imagination may speculate. At 
present it is like a thing in another world. A dark gulf is 
betwixt us. It is not tangible by the body. We can only 
approach it in the spirit." 

In this passage, written, the author tells us, " in 
awe and reverence," there is much that is terrible, 
and very much that is quite horrible, but it is not 
without a certain crude form of power, or, at any 
rate, a certain crude violence of words, a quality 
which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its 
chief defect. It is pleasanter, however, to pass to 
this description of Giulio Romano's " Cephalus and 
Procris " : — 

" We should read Moschus's lament for Bion, the sweet 
shepherd, before looking at this picture, or study the picture 
as a preparation for the lament. We have nearly the same 
images in both. For either victim the high groves and forest 
dells murmur ; the flowers exhale sad perfume from their 
buds ; the nightingale mourns on the craggy lands, and the 
swallow in the long-winding vales ; * the satyrs, too, and 
fauns dark- veiled groan,' and the fountain nymphs within the 
wood melt into tearful waters. The sheep and goats leave 
their pasture, and oreads, ' who love to scale the most inac- 
cessible tops of all uprightest rocks,' hurry down from the 
song of their wind-courting pines ; while the dryads bend 
from the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan 
for white Procris, ' with many-sobbing streams,' 

" Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice." 
The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 75 

knelling horn of Aurora's love no more shall scatter away 
the cold twilight on the top of Hymettus. The foreground 
of our subject is a grassy sunburnt bank, broken into swells 
and hollows like waves (a sort of land-breakers), rendered 
more uneven by many foot-tripping roots and stumps of trees 
stocked untimely by the axe, which are again throwing out 
light green shoots. This bank rises rather suddenly on the 
right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the en- 
trance of which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding be- 
tween his knees that ivory-bright body which was, but an 
instant agone, parting the rough boughs with her smooth 
forehead, and treading alike on thorns and flowers with 
jealousy-stung foot — now helpless, heavy, void of all mo- 
tion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery. 

"From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished 
nymphs press forward with loud cries — 

"And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, 
advance ; 
And put strange pity in their horned countenance." 

" Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid 
pace of death. On the other side of the group, Virtuous 
Love with 'vans dejected ' holds forth the arrow to an ap- 
proaching troop of sylvan people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, 
and satyr-mothers, pressing their children tighter with their 
fearful hands, who hurry along from the left in a sunken 
path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on whose 
lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her grief- 
telling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad, 
another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine- 
festooned pillars of an unshorn grove. The centre of the 
picture is filled by shady meadows, sinking down to a river- 
mouth ; beyond is ' the vast strength of the ocean stream,' 
from whose floor the extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives 



76 INTENTIONS 

furiously up her brine-washed steeds to behold the death- 
pangs of her rival." 

Were this description carefully rewritten, it would 
be quite admirable. The conception of making a 
prose-poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the 
best modern literature springs from the same aim. 
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not 
from life, but from each other. 

His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In 
everything connected with the stage, for instance, he 
was always extremely interested, and strongly up- 
held the necessity for archaeological accuracy in 
costume and scene-painting. " In art," he says in 
one of his essays, " whatever is worth doing at all 
is worth doing well; " and he points out that once 
we allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes 
difficult to say where the line is to be drawn. In 
literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous 
occasion, he was "on the side of the angels." He 
was one of the first to admire Keats and Shelley — 
"the tremulously-sensitive and poetical Shelley," 
as he calls him. His admiration for Wordsworth 
was sincere and profound. He thoroughly appre- 
ciated William Blake. One of the best copies of 
the " Songs of Innocence and Experience " that is 
now in existence was wrought specially for him. 
He loved Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 'J'J 

Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, 
and Petrarch. And to him all the arts were one. 
" Our critics," he remarks with much wisdom, " seem 
hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds of 
poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement 
in the serious study of one art cogenerates a pro- 
portionate perfection in the other;" and he says 
elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael 
Angelo talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving 
either himself or his listeners. To his fellow-contrib- 
utors in the London Magazine he was always most 
generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cun- 
ningham, Hazlitt, Elton and Leigh Hunt without 
anything of the malice of a friend. Some of his 
sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their 
way, and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow 
their style from their subject : — 

''What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou 
hadst the gaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man : as 
gentle a heart as ever sent tears to the eyes. 

" How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in 
a conceit most seasonably out of season. His talk without 
affectation was compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even 
unto obscurity. Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would 
beat out into whole sheets. He had small mercy on spurious 
fame, and a caustic observation on the fashion for men of 
genius was a standing dish. Sir Thomas Browne was a 
' bosom cronie ' of his ; so was Burton, and old Fuller. In his 
amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many- 



78 INTENTIONS 

folio odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and 
Fletcher he induced light dreams. He would deliver critical 
touches on these, like one inspired, but it was good to let him 
choose his own game ; if another began even on the acknow- 
ledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, in 
a mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive or 

mischievous. One night at C 's, the above dramatic 

partners were the temporary subject of chat. Mr. X. com- 
mended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don't 
know which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who 
told him ' That -was, nothing; the lyrics were the high things — 
the lyrics ! '" 

One side of his literary career deserves especial 
notice. Modern journalism may be said to owe 
almost as much to him as to any man of the early 
part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic 
prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pom- 
pous exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous 
that it conceals the subject is one of the highest 
achievements of an important and much admired 
school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school 
Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented. 
He also saw that it was quite easy by continued 
reiteration to make the public interested in his own 
personality, and in his purely journalistic articles 
this extraordinary young man tells the world what 
he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what 
.wines he likes, and in what state of health he is, 
just as if he were writing weekly notes for some 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 79 

popular newspaper of our own time. This being 
the least valuable side of his work, is the one that 
has had the most obvious influence. A publicist, 
now-a-days, is a man who bores the community with 
the details of the illegalities of his private life. 

Like most artificial people he had a great love of 
nature. " I hold three things in high estimation," 
he says somewhere : " to sit lazily on an eminence 
that commands a rich prospect ; to be shadowed by 
thick trees while the sun shines around me ; and to 
enjoy solitude with the consciousness of neighbour- 
hood. The country gives them all to me." He 
writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and 
heath repeating Collin's " Ode to Evening," just to 
catch the fine quality of the moment ; about smother- 
ing his face " in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with 
May dews " ; and about the pleasure of seeing the 
sweet-breathed kine "pass slowly homeward through 
the twilight," and hearing " the distant clank of the 
sheep-bell." One phrase of his, "the polyanthus 
glowed in its cold bed of earth, like a solitary picture 
of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel," is curiously 
characteristic of his temperament, and this passage 
is rather pretty in its way — 

"The short tender grass was covered with marguerites — 
' such that men called daisies in our town ' — thick as stars on 
a summer's night. The harsh caw of the busy rooks came 



8o INTENTIONS 

pleasantly mellowed from a high dusky grove of elms at some 
distance off, and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring 
away the birds from the newly-sown seeds. The blue depths 
were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a cloud 
streaked the calm aether; only round the horizon's edge 
streamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which 
the near village with its ancient stone church showed sharply 
out with blinding whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth's 
'Lines written in March.' " 

However, we must not forget that the cultivated 
young man who penned these lines, and who was so 
susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as 
I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the 
most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. 
How he first became fascinated by this strange sin 
he does not tell us, and the diary in which he care- 
fully noted the results of his terrible experiments and 
the methods that he adopted, has unfortunately been 
lost to us. Even in later days, too, he was always 
reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about 
"The Excursion," and the "Poems founded on the 
Affections." There is no doubt, however, that the 
poison that he used was strychnine. In one of the 
beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which 
served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate 
ivory hands, he used to carry crystals of the Indian 
,nux vomica, a poison, one of his biographers tells 
us, " nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 8 1 

capable of almost infinite dilution." His murders, 
says De Quincey, were more than were ever made 
known judicially. This is no doubt so, and some of 
them are worthy of mention. His first victim was 
his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned him in 
1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to 
which he had always been very n||ich attached. In 
the August of the next year he poisoned Mrs. Aher- 
crombie, his wife's mother, and ilirthe following De- 
cember he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, 
his sister-in-law. Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrom- 
bie is not ascertained. It may have been for a caprice, 
or to quicken some hideous sense of power that was 
in him, or because she suspected something, or for no 
reason. But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was 
carried out by himself and his wife for the sake of a 
sum of about 18,000/. for which they had insured her 
life in various offices. The circumstances were as fol- 
lows. On the 1 2th of December, he and his wife 
and child came up to London from Linden House, 
and took lodgings at No. 12, Conduit Street, Regent 
Street. With them were the two sisters, Helen and 
Madeleine Abercrombie. On the evening of the 14th 
they all went to the play, and at supper that night 
Helen sickened. The next day she was extremely 
ili, and Dr. Locock, of Hanover Square, was called 
in to attend her. She lived till Monday, the 20th, 



82 INTENTIONS 

when, after the doctor's morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. 
Wainewright, brought her some poisoned jelly, and 
then went out for a walk. When they returned 
Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about 
twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair 
hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing of her 
by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows 
how much his style as an artist was influenced by 
Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose work he 
had always entertained a great admiration. De 
Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really 
privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not. 
Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices. 

The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts 
of the case, declined to pay the policy on the techni- 
cal ground of misrepresentation and want of interest, 
and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an 
action in the Court of Chancery against the Im- 
perial, it being agreed that one decision should gov- 
ern all the cases. The trial, however, did not come 
on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a 
verdict was ultimately given in the companies' 
favour. The judge on the occasion was Lord Abin- 
ger. Egomet Bonmot was represented by Mr. Erie 
and Sir William Follet, and the Attorney- General 
and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for the other 
side. The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 83 

present at either of the trials. The refusal of the 
companies to give him the 18,000/. had placed him 
in a position of most painful pecuniary embarrass- 
ment. Indeed, a few months after the murder of 
Helen Abercrombie, he had been actually arrested 
for debt in the streets of London while he was sere- 
nading the pretty daughter of one of his friends. 
This difficulty was got over at the time, but shortly 
afterwards he thought it better to go abroad till he 
could come to some practical arrangement with his 
creditors. He accordingly went to Boulogne on a 
visit to the father of the young lady in question, and 
while he was there induced him to insure his life with 
the Pelican Company for 3000/. As soon as the nec- 
essary formalities had been gone through and the 
policy executed, he dropped some crystals of strych- 
nine into his coffee as they sat together one evening 
after dinner. He himself did not gain any monetary 
advantage by doing this. His aim was simply to re- 
venge himself on the first office that had refused to 
pay him the price of his sin. His friend died the 
next day in his presence, and he left Boulogne at 
once for a sketching tour through the most pictur- 
esque parts of Brittany, and was for some time the 
guest of an old French gentleman, who had a beauti- 
ful country house at St. Omer. From this he moved 
to Paris, where he remained for several years, living 



84 INTENTIONS 

in luxury, some say, while others talk of his " skulk- 
ing with poison in his pockets, and being dreaded 
by all who knew him." In 1837 he returned to 
England privately. Some strange mad fascination 
brought him back. He followed a woman whom he 
loved. 

It was the month of June, and he was staying at 
one of the hotels in Covent Garden, His sitting 
room was on the ground floor, and he prudently kept 
the blinds down for fear of being seen. Thirteen 
years before, when he was making his fine collection 
of majolica and Marc Antonios, he had forged the 
names of his trustees to a power of attorney, which 
enabled him to get possession of some of the money 
which he had inherited from his mother, and had 
brought into marriage settlement. He knew that 
this forgery had been discovered, and that by return- 
ing to England he was imperilling his life. Yet he 
returned. Should one wonder? It was said that 
the woman was very beautiful. Besides, she did 
not love him. 

It was by a mere accident that he was discovered. 
A noise in the street attracted his attention, and, in 
his artistic interest in modern life, he pushed aside 
the blind for a moment. Some one outside called 
put "That's Wainewright, the Bank-forger." It 
was Forrester, the Bow Street runner. 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 85 

On the 5th of July he was brought up at the Old 
Bailey. The following report of the proceedings 
appeared in the Times: — 

"Before Mr. Justice Vaughan and Mr. Baron Alderson, 
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, aged forty-two, a man of 
■gentlemanly appearance, wearing mustachios, was indicted for 
forging and uttering a certain power of attorney for 2259/., 
with intent to defraud the Governor and Company of the Bank 
of England. 

" There were five indictments against the prisoner, to all of 
which he pleaded not guilty, when he was arraigned before 
Mr. Serjeant Arabin in the course of the morning. On being 
brought before the judges, however, he begged to be allowed 
to withdraw the former plea, and then pleaded guilty to two 
of the indictments which were not of a capital nature. 

" The counsel for the Bank having explained that there 
were three other indictments, but that the Bank did not desire 
to shed blood, the plea of guilty on the two minor charges was 
recorded, and the prisoner at the close of the session sentenced 
by the Recorder to transportation for life." 

He was taken back to Newgate, preparatory to his 
removal to the colonies. In a fanciful passage in one 
of his early essays he had fancied himself " lying in 
Horsemonger Gaol under sentence of death " for 
having been unable to resist the temptation of steal- 
ing some Marc Antonios from the British Museum in 
order to complete his collection. The sentence now 
passed on him was to a man of his culture a form of 
death. He complained bitterly of it to his friends, 
and pointed out, with a good deal of reason, some 



86 INTENTIONS 

people may fancy, that the money was practically his 
own, having come to him from his mother, and that 
the forgery, such as it was, had been committed 
thirteen years before, which to use his own phrase, 
was at least a circonstance attennante. The per- 
manence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical 
problem, and certainly the English law solves the 
question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. 
There is, however, something dramatic in the fact 
that this heavy punishment was inflicted on him for 
what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose 
of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst 
of all his sins. 

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and 
Hablot Browne came across him by chance. They 
had been going over the prisons of London, searching 
for artistic effects, and in Newgate they suddenly 
caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a 
defiant stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was " hor- 
rified to recognize a man familiarly known to him 
in former years, and at whose table he had dined." 
Others had more curiosity, and his cell was for 
some time a kind of fashionable lounge. Many men 
of letters went down to visit their old literary 
comrade. But he was no longer the kind hght- 
hearted Janus whom Charles Lamb admired. He 
seems to have grown quite cynical. 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 87 

To the agent of an insurance company who was 
visiting him one afternoon, and thought he would 
improve the occasion by pointing out that, after all 
crime was a bad speculation, he replied : " Sir, you 
City men enter on your speculations and take the 
chances of them. Some of your speculations suc- 
ceed, some fail. Mine happen to have failed, yours 
happen to have succeeded. That is the only differ- 
ence, sir, between my visitor and me. But, sir, I 
will tell you one thing in which I have succeeded, to 
the last. I have been determined through life to hold 
the position of a gentleman. I have always done 
so. I do so still. It is the custom of this place 
that each of the inmates of a cell shall take his 
morning's turn of sweeping it out. I occupy a cell 
with a bricklayer and a sweep, but they never offer 
me the broom!" When a friend reproached him 
with the murder of Helen Abercrombie he shrugged 
his shoulders and said, "Yes; it was a dreadful 
thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." 

From Newgate he was brought to the hulks at 
Portsmouth, and sent from there in the Susan to 
Van Diemen's Land along with three hundred other 
convicts. The voyage seems to have been most 
distasteful to him, and in a letter written to a friend 
he spoke bitterly about the ignominy of " the com- 
panion of poets and artists " being compelled to 



88 INTENTIONS 

associate with " country bumpkins." The phrase 
that he applies to his companions need not surprise 
us. Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. 
It is nearly always the result of starvation. There 
was probably no one on board in whom he would 
have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psycho- 
logically interesting nature. 

His love of art, however, never deserted him. At 
Hobart Town he started a studio, and returned to 
sketching and portrait-painting, and his conversa- 
tion and manners seem not to have lost their charm. 
Nor did he give up his habit of poisoning, and there 
are two cases on record in which he tried to make 
away with people who had offended him. But his 
hand seems to have lost its cunning. Both of his 
attempts were complete failures, and in 1844, being 
thoroughly dissatisfied with Tasmanian society, he 
presented a memorial to the governor of the settle- 
ment. Sir John Eardley Wilmot, praying for a 
ticket-of-leave. In it he speaks of himself as be- 
ing " tormented by ideas struggling for outward 
form and realization, barred up from increase of 
knowledge, and deprived of the exercise of profit- 
able or even of decorous speech." His request, 
however, was refused, and the associate of Cole- 
ridge consoled himself by making those marvellous 
Paradis Artificiels whose secret is only known to 



PEN, PENCIL, AND POISON 89 

the eaters of opium. In 1852 he died of apoplexy, 
his sole living companion being a cat, for which he 
had evinced an extraordinary affection. 

His crimes seem to have had an important effect 
upon his art. They gave a strong personality to 
his style, a quality that his early work certainly 
lacked. In a note to the Life of Dickens, Forster 
mentions that in 1847 Lady Blessington received 
from her brother. Major Power, who held a military 
appointment at Hobart Town, an oil portrait of a 
young lady from his clever brush; and it is said 
that " he had contrived to put the expression of his 
own wickedness into the portrait of a nice, kind- 
hearted girl." M. Zola, in one of his novels, tells 
us of a young man who, having committed a mur- 
der, takes to art, and paints greenish impressionist 
portraits of perfectly respectable people, all of 
which bear a curious resemblance to his victim. 
The development of Mr. Wainewright's style seems 
to me far more subtle and suggestive. One can 
fancy an intense personality being created out of 
sin. 

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few 
years dazzled literary London, and made so brilliant 
a debut in life and letters, is undoubtedly a most in- 
teresting study. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, his latest 
biographer, to whom I am indebted for many of the 



90 INTENTIONS 

facts contained in this memoir, and whose little 
book is, indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is of 
opinion that his love of art and nature was a mere 
pretence and assumption, and others have denied to 
him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, 
or at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man be- 
ing a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The 
domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, 
though they may serve as an excellent advertise- 
ment for second-rate artists. It is possible that De 
Quincey exaggerated his critical powers, and I can- 
not help saying again that there is much in his 
published works that is too familiar, too common, 
too journalistic, in the bad sense of that bad word. 
Here and there he is distinctly vulgar in expression, 
and he is always lacking in the self-restraint of the 
true artist. But for some of his faults we must 
blame the time in which he Hved, and, after all, 
prose that Charles Lamb thought " capital " has no 
small historic interest. That he had a sincere love 
of art and nature seems to me quite certain. There 
is no essential incongruity between crime and cul- 
ture. We cannot re-write the whole of history for 
the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what 
should be. 

Of course, he is far too close to our own time for 
us to be able to form any purely artistic judgment 



/ ^ 

/ 

// 

PEN, PENCIL, Ai i'OISON 9 1 

about him. It is impossible not to feel a strong 
prejudice against a man who might have poisoned 
Lord Tennyson, or Mr. Gladstone, or the Master of 
Balliol. But had the man worn a costume and 
spoken a language different from our own, had he 
lived in imperial Rome, or at the time of the Italian 
Renaissance, or in Spain in the seventeenth century, 
or in any land or any century but this century and 
this land, we would be quite able to arrive at a 
perfectly unprejudiced estimate of his position and 
value. I know that there are many historians, or 
at least writers on historical subjects, who still think 
it necessary to apply moral judgments to his- 
tory, and who distribute their praise or blame with 
the solemn complacency of a successful school- 
master. This, however, is a foolish habit, and 
merely shows that the moral instinct can be 
brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will 
make its appearance wherever it is not required. 
Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams 
of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius or censuring 
Caesar Borgia. These personages have become like 
the puppets of a play. They may fill us with 
terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm 
us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We 
have nothing to fear from them. They have passed 
into the sphere of art and science, and neither art 



92 ^ ^^,£NTIONS 

nor science knows anything of moral approval or 
disapproval. And so it may be some day with 
Charles Lamb's friend. At present I feel that he 
is just a little too modern to be treated in that fine 
spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so 
many charming studies of the great criminals of the 
Italian Renaissance from the pens of Mr. John Add- 
ington Symonds, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, Miss 
Vernon Lee, and other distinguished writers. How- 
ever, Art has not forgotten him. He is the hero of 
Dickens's Hunted Down, the Varney of Bulwer's 
Lucretia; and it is gratifying to note that fiction 
has paid some homage to one who was so power- 
ful with " pen, pencil, and poison." To be sugges- 
tive for fiction is to be of more importance than a 
fact. 



/ 



HA DIALOGUE. Part L 
Persons: Gilbert and Ernest. 
Scene : the library of a house 
tn Piccadilly, overlooking the 
Green Park. 



\ 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 

WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE 
IMPORTANCE OF DOING NOTHING 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 



Gilbert {at the Piano). My dear Ernest, what are 
you laughing at? 

Ernest {looking up). At a capital story that I have 
just come across in this volume of Reminiscences that 
I have found on your table. 

Gilbert. What is the book ? Ah ! I see. I have 
not read it yet. Is it good? 

Ernest. Well, while you have been playing, I have 
been turning over the pages with some amusement, 
though, as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs. They 
are generally written by people who have either 
entirely lost their memories, or have never done any- 
thing worth remembering; which, however, is, no 
doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as 
the English public always feels perfectly at its ease 
when a mediocrity is talking to it. 

Gilbert. Yes : the public is wonderfully tolerant. 
It forgives everything except genius. But I must 

95 



96 INTENTIONS 

confess that I like all memoirs. I like them for their 
form, just as much as for their matter. In literature 
mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us 
in the letters of personalities so different as Cicero 
and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Ma- 
dame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it, and, 
strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but wel- 
come it, and do not easily forget it. Humanity will 
always love Rousseau for having confessed his sins, 
not to a priest, but to the world, and the couchant 
nymphs that Cellini wrought in bronze for the castle 
of King Francis, the green and gold Perseus, even, 
that in the open Loggia at Florence shows the moon 
the dead terror that once turned life to stone, have 
not given it more pleasure than has that autobi- 
ography in which the supreme scoundrel of the Re- 
naissance relates the story of his splendour and his 
shame. The opinions, the character, the achieve- 
ments of the man, matter very little. He may be a 
sceptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint 
like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us 
his own secrets he can always charm our ears to lis- 
tening and our lips to silence. The mode of thought 
that Cardinal Newman represented — if that can be 
called a mode of thought which seeks to solve intel- 
lectual problems by a denial of the supremacy of 
the intellect — may not, cannot, I think, survive. But 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 97 

the world will never weary of watching that troubled 
soul in its progress from darkness to darkness. The 
lonely church at Littlemore, where " the breath of 
the morning is damp, and worshippers are few," will 
always be dear to it, and whenever men see the yel- 
low snapdragon blossoming on the wall of Trinity 
they will think of that gracious undergraduate who 
saw in the flower's sure recurrence a prophecy that 
he would abide for ever with the Benign Mother of 
his days — a prophecy that Faith, in her wisdom or 
her folly, suffered not to be fulfilled. Yes ; autobi- 
ography is irresistible. Poor, silly, conceited Mr. 
Secretary Pepys has chattered his way into the circle 
of the Immortals, and, conscious that indiscretion 
is the better part of valour, bustles about among 
them in that " shaggy purple gown with gold but- 
tons and looped lace " which he is so fond of describ- 
ing to us, perfectly at his ease, and prattling, to his 
own and our infinite pleasure, of the Indian blue pet- 
ticoat that he bought for his wife, of the " good 
hog's harslet," and the " pleasant French fricassee of 
veal " that he loved to eat, of his game of bowls with 
Will Joyce, and his " gadding after beauties," and 
his reciting of Hamlet on a Sunday, and his playing 
of the viol on week days, and other wicked or trivial 
things. Even in actual life egotism is not without 
its attractions. When people talk to us about others 



98 INTENTIONS 

they are usually dull. When they talk to us about 
themselves they are nearly always interesting, and 
if one could shut them up, when they become weari- 
some, as easily as one can shut up a book of which 
one has grown weary, they would be perfect abso- 
lutely. 

Ernest. There is much virtue in that If, as Touch- 
stone would say. But do you seriously propose that 
every man should become his own Boswell ? What 
would become of our industrious compilers of Lives 
and Recollections in that case? 

Gilbert. What has become of them? They are 
the pest of the age, nothing more and nothing less. 
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and 
it is always Judas who writes the biography. 

Ernest. My dear fellow! 

Gilbert. I am afraid it is true. Formerly we used 
to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to 
vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may 
be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are 
absolutely detestable. 

Ernest. May I ask, Gilbert, to whom you allude ? 

Gilbert. Oh! to all our second-rate litterateurs. 
We are overrun by a set of people who, when poet or 
painter passes away, arrive at the house along with 
the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to 
behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 99 

They are the mere body-snatchers of literature. The 
dust is given to one, and the ashes to another, and 
the soul is out of their reach. And now, let me play 
Chopin to you, or Dvorak? Shall I play you a 
fantasy by Dvorak ? He writes passionate, curiously- 
coloured things. 

Ernest. No ; I don't want music just at present. 
It is far too indefinite. Besides, I took the Baroness 
Bernstein down to dinner last night, and, though 
absolutely charming in every other respect, she in- 
sisted on discussing music as if it were actually 
written in the German language. Now, whatever 
music sounds Hke, I am glad to say that it does not 
sound in the smallest degree like German. There 
are forms of patriotism that are really quite de- 
grading. No ; Gilbert, don't play any more. Turn 
round and talk to me. Talk to me till the white- 
horned day comes into the room. There is some- 
thing in your voice that is wonderful. 

Gilbert {rising from the piano). I am not in a 
mood for talking to-night. How horrid of you to 
smile ? I really am not. Where are the cigarettes ? 
Thanks. How exquisite these single daffodils are! 
They seem to be made of amber and cool ivory. 
They are like Greek things of the best period. What 
was the story in the confessions of the remorseful 
Academician that made you laugh? Tell it to me. 



Lore, 



lOO INTENTIONS 

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weep- 
ing over sins that I had never committed, and 
mourning over tragedies that were not my own. 
Music always seems to me to produce that effect. 
It creates for one a past of which one has been 
ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that 
have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a 
man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, 
hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and 
suddenly discovering that his soul, without his 
being conscious of it, had passed through terrible 
experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild roman- 
tic loves, or great renunciations. And so, tell me 
this story, Ernest. I want to be amused. 

Ernest. Oh ! I don't know that it is of any im- 
portance. But I thought it a really admirable illus- 
tration of the true value of ordinary art-criticism. 
It seems that a lady once gravely asked the 
remorseful Academician, as you call him, if his 
celebrated picture of " A Spring-Day at Whiteley's," 
or "Waiting for the Last Omnibus," or some subject 
of that kind, was all painted by hand ? 

Gilbert. And was it? 

Ernest. You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously 
speaking, what is the use of art-criticism? Why 
cannot the artist be left alone, to create a new 
world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST lOI 

world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, 
we would each one of us be wearied if Art, with her 
fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection, 
did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a 
momentary perfection. It seems to me that the 
imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude 
around it, and works best in silence and in isolation. 
Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill 
clamour of criticism ? Why should those who cannot 
create take upon themselves to estimate the value 
of creative work ? What can they know about it ? 
If a man's work is easy to understand, an explana- 
tion is unnecessary. . . . 

Gilbert. And if his work is incomprehensible, an 
explanation is wicked. 

Ernest. I did not say that. 

Gilbert. Ah ! but you should have. Nowadays, 
we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot 
afford to part with one of them. The members of 
the Browning Society, like the theologians of the 
Broad Church Party, or the authors of Mr. Walter 
Scott's Great Writers' Series, seem to me to spend 
their time in trying to explain their divinity away. 
Where one had hoped that Browning was a mystic, 
they have sought to show that he was simply in- 
articulate. Where one had fancied that he had 
something to conceal, they have proved that he had 



102 INTENTIONS 

but little to reveal. But I speak merely of his in- 
coherent work. Taken as a whole, the man was 
great. He did not belong to the Olympians, and 
had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He did not 
survey, and it was but rarely that he could sing. 
His work is marred by struggle, violence and effort, 
and he passed not from emotion to form, but from 
thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has 
been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who 
was always thinking, and always thi-nking aloud; 
but it was not thought that fascinated him, but 
rather the processes by which thought moves. It was 
the machine he loved, not what the machine makes. 
The method by which the fool arrives at his folly 
was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the 
wise. So much, indeed, did the subtle mechanism 
of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or 
looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of ex- 
pression. Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the 
Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its own 
voice ; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist 
becomes not merely a material element of metrical 
beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and pas- 
sion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring 
a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness 
and suggestion of sound some golden door at which 
the Imagination itself had knocked in vain ; rhyme. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST IO3 

which can turn man's utterance to the speech of 
gods ; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the 
Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning's hands a 
grotesque, misshapen thing, which made him at 
times masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and 
ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. 
There are moments when he wounds us by mon- 
strous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by 
breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and 
they snap in discord, and no Athenian tettix, making 
melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory 
horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval 
less harsh. Yet, he was great : and though he 
turned language into ignoble clay, he made from it 
men and women that live. He is the most Shakes- 
perian creature since Shakespeare. If Shakespeare 
could sing with myriad lips, Browning could stam- 
mer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I 
am speaking, and speaking not against him but for 
him, there glides through the room the pageant of 
his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with 
his cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss. 
There, stands dread Saul with the lordly male- 
sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham 
is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, 
and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of 
St. Praxed's. The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the 



I04 INTENTIONS 

corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks 
on Ottima's haggard face, and loathes her and his 
own sin, and himself. Pale as the white satin of his 
doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy 
treacherous eyes too loyal Straflford pass forth to his 
doom, and Andrea shudders as he hears the cousin's 
whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go 
down. Yes, Browning was great. And as what will 
he be remembered ? As a poet? Ah, not as a poet ! 
He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the 
most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we 
have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was 
unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own prob- 
lems, he could at least put problems forth, and what 
more should an artist do ? Considered from the 
point of view of a creator of character he ranks next 
to him who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he 
might have sat beside him. The only man who can 
touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith. 
Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. 
He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose. 

Ernest. There is something in what you say, but 
there is not everything in what you say. In many 
points you are unjust. 

Gilbert. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one 
loves. But let us return to the particular point at 
issue. What was it that you said? 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 105 

Ernest. Simply this : that in the best days of art 
there were no art-critics. 

Gilbert. I seem to have heard that observation 
before, Ernest. It has all the vitality of error and 
all the tediousness of an old friend. 

Ernest. It is true. Yes: there is no use your 
tossing your head in that petulant manner. It is 
quite true. In the best days of art there were no 
art-critics. The sculptor hewed from the marble 
block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept 
within it. The waxers and gilders of images gave 
tone and texture to the statue, and the world, when 
it saw it, worshipped and was dumb. He poured 
the glowing bronze into the mould of sand, and the 
river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took 
the impress of the body of a god. With enamel or 
polished jewels he gave sight to the sightless eyes. 
The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his 
graver. And when, in some dim frescoed fane, 
or pillared sunlit portico, the child of Leto stood 
upon his pedestal, those who passed by, a^pw? 
PaivovTs? Sioc XafxirpoTaTOD alGspo?, became conscious 
of a new influence that had come across their lives, 
and dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quick- 
ening joy, went to their homes or daily labour, or 
wandered, it may be, through the city gates to that 
nymph-haunted meadow where young Phaedrus 



I06 INTENTIONS 

bathed his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, 
beneath the tall wind-whispering planes and flower- 
ing agnus castus, began to think of the wonder of 
beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe. 
In those days the artist was free. From the river 
valley he took the fine clay in his fingers, and with 
a little tool of wood or bone, fashioned it into forms 
so exquisite that the people gave them to the dead 
as their playthings, and we find them still in the 
dusty tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, 
with the faint gold and the fading crimson still lin- 
gering about hair and lips and raiment. On a wall 
of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed 
with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with 
tired feet the purple white-starred fields of asphodel, 
one ' in whose eyelids lay the whole of the Trojan 
War,' Polyxena, the daughter of Priam ; or figured 
Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords 
to the mast-step, that he might listen without hurt to 
the singing of the Sirens, or wandering by the clear 
river of Acheron, where the ghosts of fishes flitted 
over the pebbly bed ; or showed the Persian in 
trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, 
or the galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the 
little Salaminian bay. He drew with silver-point 
and charcoal upon parchment and prepared cedar. 
Upon ivory and rose-coloured terra-cotta he painted 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST I07 

with wax, making the wax fluid with juice of olives, 
and with heated irons making it firm. Panel and 
marble and linen canvas became wonderful as his 
brush swept across them ; and life, seeing her own 
image, was still, and dared not speak. All life, 
indeed, was his, from the merchants seated in the 
market-place to the cloaked shepherd lying on the 
hill ; from the nymph hidden in the laurels and the 
faun that piped at noon, to the king whom, in long 
green-curtained litter, slaves bore upon oil-bright 
shoulders, and fanned with peacock fans. Men and 
women, with pleasure or sorrow in their faces, 
passed before him. He watched them, and their 
secret became his. Through form and colour he re- 
created a world. 

All subtle arts belonged to him also. He held 
the gem against the revolving disk, and the amethyst 
became the purple couch for Adonis, and across the 
veined sardonyx sped Artemis with her hounds. He 
beat out the gold into roses, and strung them to- 
gether for necklace or armlet. He beat out the gold 
into wreaths for the conqueror's helmet, or into 
palmates for the Tyrian robe, or into masks for the 
royal dead. On the back of the silver mirror he 
graved Thetis borne by her Nereids, or love-sick 
Phaedra with her nurse, or Persephone, weary of 
memory, putting poppies in her hair. The potter 



I08 INTENTIONS 

sat in his shed, and, flower-like from the silent 
wheel, the vase rose up beneath his hands. He 
decorated the base and stem and ears with pattern 
of dainty olive-leaf, or foliated acanthus, or curved 
and crested wave. Then in black or red he painted 
lads wrestling, or in the race: knights in full 
armour, with strange heraldic shields and curious 
visors, leaning from shell-shaped chariot over rear- 
ing steeds : the gods seated at the feast or working 
their miracles : the heroes in their victory or in their 
pain. Sometimes he would etch in thin vermilion 
lines upon a ground of white the languid bridegroom 
and his bride, with Eros hovering round them — an 
Eros like one of Donatello's angels, a little laughing 
thing with gilded or with azure wings. On the 
curved side he would write the name of his friend. 
KAAOS AAKIBIAAHS or KAAOI XAPMIAHS tells 
us the story of his days. Again, on the rim of the 
wide flat cup he would draw the stag browsing, or 
the lion at rest, as his fancy willed it. From the 
tiny perfume-bottle laughed Aphrodite at her toilet* 
and, with bare-limbed Maenads in his train, Diony- 
sus danced round the wine-jar on naked must- 
stained feet, while, satyr-like, the old Silenus 
sprawled upon the bloated skins, or shook that 
magic spear which was tipped with a fretted fir- 
cone, and wreathed with dark ivy. And no one 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST lOQ 

came to trouble the artist at his work. No irre- 
sponsible chatter disturbed him. He was not wor- 
ried by opinions. By the Ilyssus, says Arnold 
somewhere, there was no Higginbotham. By the 
Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art- 
congresses, bringing provincialism to the provinces 
and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By 
the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about 
art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do 
not understand. On the reed-grown banks of that 
little stream strutted no ridiculous journalism mo- 
nopolizing the seat of judgment when it should be 
apologizing in the dock. The Greeks had no art- 
critics. 

Gilbert. Ernest, you are quite delightful, but your 
views are terribly unsound. I am afraid that you 
have been listening to the conversation of someone 
older than yourself. That is always a dangerous 
thing to do, and if you allow it to degenerate into a 
habit, you will find it absolutely fatal to any intel- 
lectual development. As for modern journalism, it 
is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own 
existence by the great Darwinian principle of the 
survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to do 
with literature. 

Ernest. But what is the difference between litera- 
ture and journalism ? 



I lO INTENTIONS 

Gilbert. Oh! journalism is unreadable, and lit- 
erature is not read. That is all. But with re- 
gard to your statement that the Greeks had no 
art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It 
would be more just to say that the Greeks were a 
nation of art-critics. 

Ernest. Really? 

Gilbert. Yes, a nation of art-critics. But I don't 
wish to destroy the delightfully unreal picture that 
you have drawn of the relation of the Hellenic 
artist to the intellectual spirit of his age. To give 
an accurate description of what has never occurred 
is not merely the proper occupation of the his- 
torian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of 
parts and culture. Still less do I desire to talk 
learnedly. Learned conversation is either the af- 
fectation of the ignorant or the profession of the 
mentally unemployed. And as for what is called 
improving conversation, that is merely the foolish 
method by which the still more foolish philanthro- 
pist feebly tries to disarm the just rancour of the 
criminal classes. No : let me play to you some mad 
scarlet thing by Dvorak. The pallid figures on the 
tapestry are smiling at us, and the heavy eyelids of 
my bronze Narcissus are folded in sleep. Don't let 
us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too con- 
scious of the fact that we are born in an age when 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST III 

only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in ter- 
ror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me 
into the position of giving you useful information. 
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to 
remember from time to time that nothing that is 
worth knowing can be taught. Through the parted 
curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped 
piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster 
round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let 
us go out into the night. Thought is wonderful, 
but adventure is more wonderful still. Who knows 
but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and 
hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she 
seems ? 

Ernest. You are horribly wilful. I insist on your 
discussing this matter with me. You have said that 
the Greeks were a nation of art- critics. What art- 
criticism have they left us? 

Gilbert. My dear Ernest, even if not a single 
fragment of art-criticism had come down to us from 
Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it would be none the 
less true that the Greeks were a nation of art- 
critics, and that they invented the criticism of art 
just as they invented the criticism of everything 
else. For, after all, what is our primary debt to 
the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit. And, this 
spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion 



112 INTENTIONS 

and science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics 
and education, they exercised on questions of art 
also, and, indeed, of the two supreme and highest 
arts, they have left us the most flawless system of 
criticism that the world has ever seen. 

Ernest. But what are the two supreme and high- 
est arts? 

Gilbert. Life and Literature, life and the perfect 
expression of life. The principles of the former, as 
laid down by the Greeks, we may not realize in an 
age so marred by false ideals as our own. The 
principles of the latter, as they laid them down, are, 
in many cases, so subtle that we can hardly under- 
stand them. Recognizing that the most perfect art is 
that which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite 
variety, they elaborated the criticism of language, 
considered in the light of the mere material of that 
art, to a point to which we, with our accentual sys- 
tem of reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely 
if at all attain ; studying, for instance, the metrical 
movements of a prose as scientifically as a modern 
musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I 
need hardly say, with much keener aesthetic instinct. 
In this they were right, as they were right in all 
things. Since the introduction of printing, and the 
fatal development of the habit of reading amongst 
the middle and lower classes of this country, there 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST II 3 

has been a tendency in literature to appeal more and 
more to the eye, and less and less to the ear, which 
is really the sense which, from the standpoint of 
pure art, it should seek to please, and by whose 
canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even the 
work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most 
perfect master of English prose now creating amongst 
us, is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a 
passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack 
the true rhythmical life of words and the fine free- 
dom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life 
produces. We, in fact, have made writing a definite 
mode of composition, and have treated it as a form 
of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the other 
hand, regarded writing simply as a method of chron- 
icling. Their test was always the spoken word in 
its musical and metrical relations. The voice was 
the medium, and the ear the critic. I have some- 
times thought that the story of Homer's blindness 
might be really an artistic myth, created in critical 
days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the 
great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the 
eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the 
soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his 
song out of music, repeating each line over and 
over again to himself till he has caught the secret 
of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that 



1 14 INTENTIONS 

are winged with light. Certainly, whether this be 
so or not, it was to his blindness, as an occasion if 
not as a cause, that England's great poet owed 
much of the majestic movement and sonorous splen- 
dour of his later verse. When Milton could no 
longer write, he began to sing. Who would match 
the measures of Comus with the measures of Sam- 
son Agonistes, or of Paradise Lost or Regained f 
When Milton became blind he composed, as every- 
one should compose, with the voice purely, and so 
the pipe or reed of earlier days became that mighty 
many-stopped organ whose rich reverberant music 
has all the stateliness of Homeric verse, if it seeks 
not to have its swiftness, and is the one imperish- 
able inheritance of English literature, sweeping 
through all the ages, because above them, and 
abiding with us ever, being immortal in its form. 
Yes: writing has done much harm to writers. 
We must return to the voice. That must be our 
test, and perhaps then we shall be able to appreciate 
some of the subtleties of Greek art-criticism. 

As it now is, we cannot do so. Sometimes, when 
I have written a piece of prose that I have been 
modest enough to consider absolutely free from 
fault, a dreadful thought comes over me that I 
may have been guilty of the immoral effeminacy of 
using trochaic and tribrachic movements, a crime 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST II 5 

for which a learned critic of the Augustan age 
censures with most just severity the brilliant if 
somewhat paradoxical Hegesias. I grow cold when 
I think of it, and wonder to myself if the admirable 
ethical effect of the prose of that charming writer, 
who once in a spirit of reckless generosity towards 
the uncultivated portion of our community pro- 
claimed the monstrous doctrine that conduct is 
three-fourths of life, will not some day be entirely 
annihilated by the discovery that the paeons have 
been wrongly placed. 

Ernest. Ah ! now you are flippant. 

Gilbert. Who would not be flippant when he is 
gravely told that the Greeks had no art-critics? I 
can understand it being said that the constructive 
genius of the Greeks lost itself in criticism, but not 
that the race to whom we owe the critical spirit did 
not criticise. You will not ask me to give you a sur- 
vey of Greek art-criticism from Plato to Plotinus. 
The night is too lovely for that, and the moon, if she 
heard us, would put more ashes on her face than are 
there already. But think merely of one perfect little 
work of aesthetic criticism, Aristotle's Treatise on 
Poetry. It is not perfect in form, for it is badly writ- 
ten, consisting perhaps of notes jotted down for an 
art lecture, or of isolated fragments destined for 
some larger book, but in temper and treatment it is 



Il6 INTENTIONS 

perfect absolutely. The ethical effect of art, its im- 
portance to culture, and its place in the formation of 
character, had been done once for all by Plato ; but 
here we have art treated, not from the moral, but 
from the purely aesthetic point of view. Plato had, 
of course, dealt with many definitely artistic sub- 
jects, such as the importance of unity in a work of 
art, the necessity for tone and harmony, the aesthetic 
value of appearances, the relation of the visible arts 
to the external world, and the relation of fiction to 
fact. He first perhaps stirred in the soul of man 
that desire which we have not yet satisfied, the de- 
sire to know the connection between Beauty and 
Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and in- 
tellectual order of the Kosmos. The problems of 
idealism and realism, as he sets them forth, may 
seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the 
metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he 
places them, but transfer them to the sphere of art, 
and you will find that they are still vital and full of 
meaning. It may be that it is as a critic of Beauty 
that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering 
the name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find 
a new philosophy. But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals 
with art primarily in its concrete manifestations, 
taking Tragedy, for instance, and investigating the 
material it uses, which is language, its subject-mat- 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST II 7 

ter, which is life, the method by which it works, which 
is action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, 
which are those of theatric presentation, its logical 
structure, which is plot, and its final aesthetic appeal, 
which is to the sense of beauty realized through the 
passions of pity and awe. That purification and 
spiritualizing of the nature which he calls %d6apoic is, 
as Goethe saw, essentially assthetic, and is not moral, 
as Lessing fancied. Concerning himself primarily 
with the impression that the work of art produces, 
Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to 
investigate its source, to see how it is engendered. 
As a physiologist and psychologist, he knows that 
the health of a function resides in energy. To have 
a capacity for a passion and not to realize it, is to 
make oneself incomplete and limited. The mimic 
spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the 
bosom of much * perilous stuff,* and by presenting 
high and worthy objects for the exercise of the emo- 
tions purifies and spirituaHzes the man; nay, not 
merely does it spiritualize him, but it initiates him 
also into noble feelings of which he might else have 
known nothing, the word xaGapotg having, it has 
sometimes seemed to me, a definite allusion to the 
rite of initiation, if indeed that be not, as I am occa- 
sionally tempted to fancy, its true and only meaning 
here. This is of course a mere outline of the book. 



Il8 INTENTIONS 

But you see what a perfect piece of aesthetic criti- 
cism it is. Who indeed but a Greek could have 
analysed art so well ? After reading it, one does not 
wonder any longer that Alexandria devoted itself 
so largely to art- criticism, and that we find the ar- 
tistic temperaments of the day investigating every 
question of style and manner, discussing the great 
Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as 
the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve the 
dignified traditions of the antique mode, or the 
realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at re- 
producing actual life, or the elements of ideality in 
portraiture, or the artistic value of the epic form in 
an age so modern as theirs, or the proper subject- 
matter for the artist. Indeed, I fear that the inar- 
tistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also 
in matters of literature and art, for the accusations 
of plagiarism were endless, and such accusations pro- 
ceed either from the thin colourless lips of impo- 
tence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, 
possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can 
gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they 
have been robbed. And I assure you, my dear Er- 
nest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite 
as much as people do nowadays, and had their private 
views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts 
guilds, and Pre- Raphael movements, and movements 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST II 9 

towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote 
essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and 
their archaeologists, and all the rest of it. Why, 
even the theatrical managers of travelling compa- 
nies brought their dramatic critics with them when 
they went on tour, and paid them very handsome 
salaries for writing laudatory notices. Whatever, 
in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. 
Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediaevalism. 
It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system 
of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct 
v/as, may be seen from the fact that the material 
they criticised with most care was, as I have already 
said, language. For the material that painter or 
sculptor uses is meagre in comparison with that of 
words. Words have not merely music as sweet as 
that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any 
that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian 
or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and 
certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in 
bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are 
theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks 
had criticised nothing but language, they would still 
have been the great art-critics of the world. To 
know the principles of the highest art, is to know the 
principles of all the arts. 

But I see that the moon is hiding behind a sulphur- 



I20 INTENTIONS 

coloured cloud. Out of a tawny mane of drift she 
gleams like a lion's eye. She is afraid that I will talk 
to you of Lucian and Longinus, of Quinctilian and 
Dionysius, of Pliny and Fronto and Pausanias, of all 
those who in the antique world wrote or lectured 
upon art-matters. She need not be afraid. I am 
tired of my expedition into the dim, dull abyss of 
facts. There is nothing left for me now but the 
divine (JLOVoXpovo? t^Sovy] of another cigarette. Ciga- 
rettes have at least the charm of leaving one unsat- 
isfied. 

Ernest. Try one of mine. They are rather good. 
I get them direct from Cairo. The only use of our 
attaches is that they supply their friends with excel- 
lent tobacco. And as the moon has hidden herself, 
let us talk a little longer. I am quite ready to admit 
that I was wrong in what I said about the Greeks. 
They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of art- 
critics. I acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for 
them. For the creative faculty is higher than the 
critical. There is really no comparison between 
them. 

Gilbert. The antithesis between them is entirely 
arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no 
artistic creation at all, worthy of the name. You 
spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice 
and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 121 

realizes life for us, and gives to it a momentary per- 
fection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact 
of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its 
most characteristic moods, and no one who does not 
possess this critical faculty can create anything at 
all in art. Arnold's definition of literature as a criti- 
cism of hfe, was not very felicitous in form, but it 
showed how keenly he recognized the importance 
of the critical element in all creative work. 

Ernest. I should have said that great artists 
worked unconsciously, that they were " wiser than 
they knew," as, I think, Emerson remarks some- 
where. 

Gilbert. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine 
imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. 
No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no 
great poet does. A great poet sings because he 
chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has always been 
so. We are sometimes apt to think that the voices 
that sounded at the dawn of poetry were simpler, 
fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the 
world which the early poets looked at, and through 
which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of 
its own, and almost without changing could pass into 
song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and 
its steep scarped sides are bleak and barren, but 
once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed 



122 INTENTIONS 

the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at 
evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in 
the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other 
ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. 
Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that 
produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and 
the work that seems to us to be the most natural 
and simple product of its time is always the result 
of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, 
there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and 
self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one. 

Ernest. I see what you mean, and there is much 
in it. But surely you would admit that the great 
poems of the early world, the primitive, anonymous 
collective poems, were the result of the imagination 
of races, rather than of the imagination of in- 
dividuals ? 

Gilbert. Not when they became poetry. Not 
when they received a beautiful form. For there is 
no art where there is no style, and no style where 
there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. 
No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal 
with, as Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and 
novels from which to work, but they were merely his 
rough material. He took them, and shaped them 
into song. They become his, because he made 
them lovely. They were built out of music. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 23 

" And so not built at all, 
And therefore built for ever." 

The longer one studies life and literature, the more 
strongly one feels that behind everything that is 
wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the 
moment that makes the man, but the man who 
creates the age. Indeed, I am inclined to think that 
each myth and legend that seems to us to spring out 
of the wonder, or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, 
was in its origin the invention of one single mind. 
The curiously limited number of the myths seems to 
me to point to this conclusion. But we must not go 
off into questions of comparative mythology. We 
must keep to criticism. And what I want to point 
out is this. An age that has no criticism is either 
an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and con- 
fined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age 
that possesses no art at all. There have been 
critical ages that have not been creative, in the 
ordinary sense of the word, ages in which the spirit 
of man has sought to set in order the treasures of 
his treasure house, to separate the gold from the 
silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over the 
jewels, and to give names to the pearls. But there 
has never been a creative age that has not been 
critical also. For it is the critical faculty that in- 
vents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to 



124 INTENTIONS 

repeat itself. It is to the critical instinct that we 
owe each new school that springs up, each new 
mould that art finds ready to its hand. There is 
really not a single form that art now uses that does 
not come to us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, 
where these forms were either stereotyped, or in- 
vented, or made perfect. I say Alexandria, not 
merely because it was there that the Greek spirit 
became most self-conscious, and indeed ultimately 
expired in scepticism and theology, but because it 
was to that city, and not to Athens, that Rome 
turned for her models, and it was through the 
survival, such as it was, of the Latin language that 
culture lived at all. When, at the Renaissance, 
Greek literature dawned upon Europe, the soil had 
been in some measure prepared for it. But, to get 
rid of the details of history, which are always weari- 
some and usually inaccurate, let us say generally, 
that the forms of art have been due to the Greek 
critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the 
entire drama in every one of its developments, in- 
cluding burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the 
novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the 
oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not 
forgive them, and the epigram, in all the wide mean- 
ing of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, 
except the sonnet, to which, however, some curious 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 12$ 

parallels of thought-movement may be traced in the 
Anthology, American journalism, to which no paral- 
lel can be found anywhere, and the ballad in sham 
Scotch dialect, which one of our most industrious 
writers has recently proposed should be made the 
basis for a final and unanimous effort on the part of 
our second-rate poets to make themselves really 
romantic. Each new school, as it appears, cries out 
against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in 
man that it owes its origin. The mere creative 
instinct does not innovate, but reproduces. 

Ernest. You have been talking of criticism as an 
essential part of the creative spirit, and I now fully 
accept your theory. But what of criticism outside 
creation ? I have a foolish habit of reading periodi- 
cals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism 
is perfectly valueless. 

Gilbert. So is most modern creative work also. 
Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the balance, and 
incompetence applauding its brother — that is the 
spectacle which the artistic activity of England 
affords us from time to time. And yet, I feel I am 
a little unfair in this matter. As a rule, the critics — 
I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those in 
fact who write for the sixpenny papers — are far 
more cultured than the people whose work they are 
called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what 



126 INTENTIONS 

one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely 
more cultivation than creation does. 

Ernest. Really? 

Gilbert. Certainly. Anybody can write a three- 
volumed novel. It merely requires a complete 
ignorance of both life and literature. The difficulty 
that I should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty 
of sustaining any standard. Where there is no style 
a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers 
are apparently reduced to be the reporters of the 
police-court of literature, the chroniclers of the 
doings of the habitual criminals of art. It is some- 
times said of them that they do not read all through 
the works they are called upon to criticise. They 
do not. Or at least they should not. If they did 
so, they would become confirmed misanthropes, or 
if I may borrow a phrase from one of the pretty 
Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes for 
the rest of their lives. Nor is it necessary. To know 
the vintage and quality of a wine one need not 
drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in 
half an hour to say whether a book is worth any- 
thing or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really 
sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who 
wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes 
it, and that is quite enough — more than enough, I 
should imagine. I am aware that there are many 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 127 

honest workers in painting as well as in literature 
who object to criticism entirely. They are quite 
right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation 
to their age. It brings us no new element of 
pleasure. It suggests no fresh departure of thought, 
or passion, or beauty. It should not be spoken of. 
It should be left to the oblivion that it deserves. 

Ernest. But, my dear fellow — excuse me for inter- 
rupting you — you seem to me to be allowing your 
passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too far. 
For, after all, even you must admit that it is much 
more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it. 

Gilbert. More difficult to do a thing than to talk 
about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular 
error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a 
thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that 
is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. 
Only a great man can write it. There is no mode 
of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share 
with the lower animals. It is only by language that 
we rise above them, or above each other — by lan- 
guage, which is the parent, and not the child, of 
thought. Action, indeed, is always easy, and when 
presented to us in its most aggravated, because most 
continuous form, which I take to be that of real in- 
dustry, becomes simply the refuge of people who 
have nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don't 



128 INTENTIONS 

talk about action. It is a blind thing dependent 
on external influences, and moved by an impulse 
of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing in- 
complete in its essence, because limited by accident, 
and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance 
with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. 
It is the last resource of those who know not how 
to dream. 

Ernest. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were 
a crystal ball. You hold it in your hand, and reverse 
it to please a wilful fancy. You do nothing but re- 
write history. 

Gilbert. The one duty we owe to history is to re- 
write it. That is not the least of the tasks in store 
for the critical spirit. When we have fully discovered 
the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realize 
that the one person who has more illusions than the 
dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows 
neither the origin of his deeds nor their results. 
From the field in which he thought that he had 
sown thorns, we have gathered our vintage, and the 
fig-tree that he planted for our pleasure is as barren 
as the thistle, and more bitter. It is because 
Humanity has never known where it was going that 
it has been able to find its way. 

Ernest. You think, then, that in the sphere of 
action a conscious aim is a delusion? 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 129 

Gilbert. It is worse than a delusion. If we lived 
long enough to see the results of our actions it may- 
be that those who call themselves good would be 
sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the 
world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little 
thing that we do passes into the great machine of 
life, which may grind our virtues to powder and make 
them worthless, or transform our sins into elements 
of a new civilization, more marvellous and more 
splendid than any that has gone before. But men 
are the slaves of words. They rage against Ma- 
terialism, as they call it, forgetting that there has 
been no material improvement that has not spiritual- 
ized the world, and that there have been few, if any, 
spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's 
faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, 
and empty or trammelling creeds. What is termed 
Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it 
the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become 
colourless. By its curiosity. Sin increases the ex- 
perience of the race. Through its intensified asser- 
tion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of 
type. In its rejection of the current notions about 
morality, it is one with the higher ethics. And as 
for the virtues! What are the virtues? Nature, 
M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity, and it 
may be that it is to the shame of the Magdalen, and 



1 30 INTENTIONS 

not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of 
modern life owe their freedom from stain. Charity, 
as even those of whose religion it makes a formal 
part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates 
a multitude of evils. The mere existence of con- 
science, that faculty of which people prate so much 
nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of 
our imperfect development. It must be merged in 
instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply 
a method by which man arrests his progress, and 
self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the 
savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so 
terrible a factor in the history of the world, and 
which even now makes its victims day by day, and 
has its altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows 
what the virtues are ? Not you. Not I. Not any- 
one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the 
criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might 
show us what we had gained by his crime. It is 
well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyr- 
dom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his 
harvest. 

Ernest. Gilbert, you sound too harsh a note. Let 
us go back to the more gracious fields of literature. 
What was it you said ? That it was more difficult to 
talk about a thing than to do it ? 

Gilbert {after a pause). Yes: I believe I ventured 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 13I 

upon that simple truth. Surely you see now that I 
am right ? When man acts he is a puppet. When 
he describes he is a poet. The whole secret lies in 
that. It was easy enough on the sandy plains by 
windy Ilion to send the notched arrow from the 
painted bow, or to hurl against the shield of hide 
and flame-like brass the long ash-handled spear. It 
was easy for the adulterous queen to spread the 
Tyrian carpets for her lord, and then, as he lay 
couched in the marble bath, to throw over his head 
the purple net, and call to her smooth-faced lover to 
stab through the meshes at the heart that should have 
broken at Aulis. For Antigone even, with Death 
waiting for her as her bridegroom, it was easy to pass 
through the tainted air at noon, and climb the hill, 
and strew with kindly earth the wretched naked 
corse that had no tomb. But what of those who 
wrote about these things ? What of those who gave 
them reality, and made them live for ever? Are 
they not greater than the men and women they sing 
of? " Hector that sweet knight is dead," and Lu- 
cian tells us how in the dim underworld Menippus 
saw the bleaching skull of Helen, and marvelled that 
it was for so grim a favour that all those horned ships 
were launched, those beautiful mailed men laid low, 
those towered cities brought to dust. Yet, every 
day the swan-like daughter of Leda comes out on the 



132 INTENTIONS 

battlements, and looks down at the tide of war. The 
greybeards wonder at her loveliness, and she stands 
by the side of the king. In his chamber of stained 
ivory lies her leman. He is polishing his dainty 
armour, and combing the scarlet plume. With 
squire and page, her husband passes from tent to 
tent. She can see his bright hair, and he:ars, or fan- 
cies that she hears, that clear cold voice. In the 
courtyard below, the son of Priam is buckling on his 
brazen cuirass. The white arms of Andromache are 
around his neck. He sets his helmet on the ground, 
lest their babe should be frightened. Behind the 
embroidered curtains of his pavilion sits Achilles, 
in perfumed raiment, while in harness of gilt and sil- 
ver the friend of his soul arrays himself to go forth 
to the fight. From a curiously carven chest that his 
mother Thetis had brought to his ship-side, the Lord 
of the Myrmidons takes out that mystic chalice that 
the lip of man had never touched, and cleanses it 
with brimstone, and with fresh water cools it, and, 
having washed his hands, fills with black wine its 
burnished hollow, and spills the thick grape-blood 
upon the ground in honour of Him whom at Dodona 
barefooted prophets worshipped, and prays to Him, 
and knows not that he prays in vain, and that by the 
hands of two knights from Troy, Panthous' son, 
Euphorbus, whose love-locks were looped with gold, 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 33 

and the Priamid, the Hon-hearted, Patroklus, the 
comrade of comrades, must meet his doom. Phan- 
toms, are they ? Heroes of mist and mountain ? 
Shadows in a song? No: they are real. Action! 
What is action ? It dies at the moment of its energy. 
It is a base concession to fact. The world is made 
by the singer for the dreamer. 
. Ernest. While you talk it seems to me to be so. 
Gilbert. It is so in truth. On the mouldering cita- 
del, of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green 
bronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of 
Priam. ' Over the empty plain wander shepherd and 
goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine- 
surfaced, oily sea, olvo^}) tcovto?, as Homer calls it, cop- 
per-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great 
galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming cres- 
cent, the lonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and 
watches the bobbing corks of his net. Yet, every 
morning the doors of the city are thrown open, and 
on foot, or in horse-drawn chariot, the warriors go 
forth to battle, and mock their enemies from behind 
their iron masks. All day long the fight rages, and 
when night comes the torches gleam by the tents, and 
the cresset burns in the hall. Those who live in mar- 
ble or on painted panel, know of life but a single ex- 
quisite instant, eternal indeed in its beauty, but lim- 
ited to one note of passion or one mood of calm. 



1 34 INTENTIONS 

Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad 
emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, 
of pleasure and of suffering. The seasons come and 
go in glad or saddening pageant, and with winged or 
leaden feet the years pass by before them. They 
have their youth and their manhood, they are chil- 
dren, and they grow old. It is always dawn for 
St. Helena, as Veronese saw her at the window. 
Through the still morning air the angels bring her 
the symbol of God's pain. The cool breezes of the 
morning hft the gilt threads from her brow. On that 
little hill by the city of Florence, where the lovers of 
Giorgione are lying, it is always the solstice of noon, 
of noon made so languorous by summer suns that 
hardly can the slim naked girl dip into the marble 
tank the round bubble of clear glass, and the long 
fingers of the lute-player rest idly upon the chords. 
It is twilight always for the dancing nymphs whom 
Corot set free among the silver poplars of France. 
In eternal twilight they move, those frail diaphanous 
figures, whose tremulous white feet seem not to touch 
the dew-drenched grass they tread on. But those 
who walk in epos, drama, or romance, see through 
the labouring months the young moons wax and 
wane, and watch the night from evening unto morn- 
ing star, and from sunrise unto sunsetting can note 
the shifting day with all its gold and shadow. For 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 135 

them, as for us, the flowers bloom and wither, and 
the Earth, that Green-tressed Goddess as Coleridge 
calls her, alters her raiment for their pleasure. The 
statue is concentrated to one moment of perfection. 
The image stained upon the canvas possesses no 
spiritual element of growth or change. If they know 
nothing of death, it is because they know little of 
life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, 
and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, 
and who possess not merely the present but the fu- 
ture, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of 
shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, 
can be truly realized by Literature alone. It is 
Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness 
and the soul in its unrest. 

Ernest. Yes; I see now what you mean. But, 
surely, the higher you place the creative artist, the 
lower must the critic rank. 

Gilbert. Why so ? 

Ernest. Because the best that he can give us will 
be but an echo of rich music, a dim shadow of clear- 
outlined form. It may, indeed, be that life is chaos, 
as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are 
mean and its heroisms ignoble ; and that it is the 
function of Literature to create, from the rough 
material of actual existence, a new world that will 
be more marvellous, more enduring, and more true 



136 INTENTIONS 

than the world that common eyes look upon, and 
through which common natures seek to realize their 
perfection. But surely, if this new world has been 
made by the spirit and touch of a great artist, it 
will be a thing so complete and perfect that there 
will be nothing left for the critic to do. I quite 
understand now, and indeed admit most readily, 
that it is far more difficult to talk about a thing than 
to do it. But it seems to me that this sound and 
sensible maxim, which is really extremely soothing 
to one's feelings, and should be adopted as its 
motto by every Academy of Literature all over the 
world, applies only to the relations that exist be- 
tween Art and Life, and not to any relations that 
there may be between Art and Criticism. 

Gilbert. But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. 
And just as artistic creation implies the working of 
the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot 
be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative 
in the highest sense of the word. Criticism is, in 
fact, both creative and independent. 

Ernest. Independent? 

Gilbert. Yes ; independent. Criticism is no more 
to be judged by any low standard of imitation or 
resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. 
The critic occupies the same relation to the work of 
art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 137 

world of form and colour, or the unseen world of 
passion and of thought. He does not even require 
for the perfection of his art the finest materials. 
Anything will serve his purpose. And just as out 
of the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly 
wife of a small country doctor in the squalid village 
of Yonville-l'Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flau- 
bert was able to create a classic, and make a mas- 
terpiece of style, so, from subjects of little or of no 
importance, such as the pictures in this year's Royal 
Academy, or in any year's Royal Academy for that 
matter, Mr. Lewis Morris's poems, M. Ohnet's 
novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, 
the true critic can, if it be his pleasure so to direct 
or waste his faculty of contemplation, produce 
work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct 
with intellectual subtlety. Why not? Dullness is 
always an irresistible temptation for brilliancy, and 
stupidity is the permanent Bestia Trionfans that 
calls wisdom from its cave. To an artist so creative 
as the critic, what does subject-matter signify? No 
more and no less than it does to the novelist afid 
the painter. Like them, he can find his motives 
everywhere. Treatment is the test. There is 
nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge. 

Ernest. But is criticism really a creative art ? 

Gilbert. Why should it not be? It works with 



138 INTENTIONS 

materials, and puts them into a form that is at once 
new and delightful. What more can one say of 
poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation 
within a creation. For just as the great artists, 
from Homer and ^schylus, down to Shakespeare 
and Keats, did not go directly to life for their sub- 
ject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, 
and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials 
that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to 
which imaginative form and colour had been already 
added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest 
Criticism, being thie purest form of personal impres- 
sion, is in its way more creative than creation, as it 
has least reference to any standard external to it- 
self, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, 
as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, 
an end. Certainly, it is never trammelled by any 
shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considera- 
tion of probability, that cowardly concession to the 
tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect 
it ever. One may appeal from fiction unto fact. 
But from the soul there is no appeal, 

Ernest. From the soul? 

Gilbert. Yes, from the soul. That is what the 
highest criticism really is, the record of one's own 
soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is 
concerned simply with oneself. It is more delight- 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 139 

ful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and 
not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only 
civiHzed form of autobiography, as it deals not with 
the events, but with the thoughts of one's life ; not 
with life's physical accidents of deed or circum- 
stance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative 
passions of the mind. I am always amused by the 
silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day 
who seem to imagine that the primary function of 
the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work. 
The best that one can say of most modern creative 
art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reahty, 
and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction 
and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer 
to look into the silver mirror or through the woven 
veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos 
and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror 
be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is 
to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him 
that pictures are painted, books written, and marble 
hewn into form. 

Ernest. I seem to have heard another theory of 
Criticism. 

Gilbert. Yes: it has been said by one whose 
gracious memory we all revere, and the music of 
whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian 
fields, and made those white feet stir, and not in 



I40 INTENTIONS 

vain, the Cumnor cowslips, that the proper aim of 
Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is. 
But this is a very serious error, and takes no cogni- 
zance of Criticism's most perfect form, which is in 
its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its 
own secret and not the secret of another. For the 
highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but 
as impressive purely. 

Ernest. But is that really so ? 

Gilbert. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. 
Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not ? What 
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose 
of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble 
eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, 
so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of 
word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art 
as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot 
on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery; 
greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not 
merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, 
but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul 
speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not 
through form and colouralone, though through these, 
indeed, completely and without loss, but with in- 
tellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion 
and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, 
and with poetic aim ; greater, I always think, even as 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST I4I 

Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares 
whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of 
Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed 
of? The painter may have been merely the slaVe of 
an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but when- 
ever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of 
the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure 
" set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic 
rocks, as in some faint light under sea," I murmur 
to myself, " She is older than the rocks among which 
she sits ; like the vampire, she has been dead many 
times, and learned the secrets of the grave ; and has 
been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day 
about her; and trafficked for strange webs with 
Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother 
of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of 
Mary ; and all this has been to her but as the sound 
of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with 
which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and 
tinged the eyelids and the hands." And I say to 
my friend, " The presence that thus so strangely 
rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the 
ways of a thousand years man had come to desire;" 
and he answers me, " Hers is the head upon which 
all ' the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids 
are a little weary." 

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us 



142 INTENTIONS 

than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, 
in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the 
mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that 
flute-player's music that lent to the lips of La 
Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do 
you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any- 
one told him of this picture that "all the thoughts 
and experience of the world had etched and moulded 
therein that which they had of power to refine and 
make expressive the outward form, the animalism of 
Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle 
Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative 
loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of 
the Borgias?" He would probably have answered 
that he had contemplated none of these things, but 
had concerned himself simply with certain arrange- 
ments of lines and masses, and with new and curious 
colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for 
this very reason that the criticism which I have 
quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the 
work of art simply as a starting point for a new 
creation. It does not confine itself — let us at least 
suppose so for the moment — to discovering the real 
intention of the artist and accepting that as final. 
And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beauti- 
ful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of 
him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 43 

it Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the 
beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it 
marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation 
to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our 
lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps 
of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may 
receive. The longer I study, Ernest, the more 
clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts is, 
as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and 
that it may be marred, and indeed often is so, by any 
excess of intellectual intention on the part of the 
artist. For when the work is finished it has, as it 
were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver 
a message far other than that which was put into 
its lips to say. Sometimes, when I listen to the 
overture to Tannhduser, I seem indeed to see that 
comely knight treading delicately on the flower- 
strewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling 
to him from the caverned hill. But at other times 
it speaks to me of a thousand different things, of 
myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the lives 
of others whom one has loved and grown weary of 
loving, or of the passions that man has known, or of 
the passions that man has not known, and so has 
sought for. To-night it may fill one with that EPS31S 
T^N AATNATi^N, that ' Amour de ^Impossible,' 
which falls like a madness on many who think they 



144 INTENTIONS 

live securely and out of reach of harm, so that they 
sicken suddenly with the poison of unlimited desire, 
and, in the infinite pursuit of what they may not 
obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. To- 
morrow, like the music of which Aristotle and Plato 
tell us, the noble Dorian music of the Greek, it 
may perform the office of a physician, and give us 
an anodyne against pain, and heal the spirit that is 
wounded, and " bring the soul into harmony with 
all right things." And what is true about music is 
true about all the arts. Beauty has as many mean- 
ings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of 
symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it 
expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows 
us the whole fiery-coloured world. 

Ernest. But is such work as you have talked about 
really criticism? 

Gilbert. It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises 
not merely the individual work of art, but Beauty 
itself, and fills with wonder a form which the artist 
may have left void, or not understood, or understood 
incompletely. 

Ernest. The highest Criticism, then, is more cre- 
ative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic 
is to see the object as in itself it really is not; that 
is your theory, I believe? 

Gilbert. Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 145 

work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work 
of his own, that need not necessarily bear any ob- 
vious resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one 
characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put 
into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever 
one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to 
creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes 
the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a 
thousand different things which were not present in 
the mind of him who carved the statue or painted 
the panel or graved the gem. 

It is sometimes said by those who understand 
neither the nature of the highest Criticism nor the 
charm of the highest Art, that the pictures that the 
critic loves most to write about are those that be- 
long to the anecdotage of painting, and that deal 
with scenes taken out of literature or history. But 
this is not so. Indeed, pictures of this kind are far 
too intelligible. Asa class, they rank with illustra- 
tions, and even considered from this point of view 
are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but 
set definite bounds to it. For the domain of the 
painter is, as I suggested before, widely different 
from that of the poet. To the latter belongs life 
in its full and absolute entirety; not merely the 
beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men 
listen to also ; not merely the momentary grace of 



146 INTENTIONS 

form or the transient gladness of colour, but the 
whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of 
thought. The painter is so far limited that it is 
only through the mask of the body that he can 
show us the mystery of the soul ; only through 
conventional images that he can handle ideas ; only 
through its physical equivalents that he can deal 
with psychology. And how inadequately does he 
do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban of 
the Moor for the noble rage of Othello, or a dotard 
in a storm for the wild madness of Lear! Yet it 
seems as if nothing could stop him. Most of our 
elderly English painters spend their wicked and 
wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the 
poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, 
and striving to render, by visible form or colour, 
the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of 
what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural 
consequence, insufferably tedious. They have de- 
graded the visible arts into the obvious arts, and 
the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious. 
I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of 
the same subject. They have always done so, and 
will always do so. But while the poet can be picto- 
rial or not, as he chooses, the painter must be pic- 
torial always. For a painter is limited, not to what he 
sees in nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST I47 

And SO, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind 
will not really fascinate the critic. He will turn 
from them to such works as make him brood and 
dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle 
quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that 
even from them there is an escape into a wider 
world. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an 
artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But 
the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists 
is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, 
when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder 
and its mystery, and becomes simply a new start- 
ing-point for an ideal that is other than itself. This 
is the reason why music is the perfect type of art. 
Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, 
also, is the explanation of the value of Umitations 
in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative 
colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of 
form, because by such renunciations they are able 
to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, 
which would be mere imitation, and too definite a 
realization of the Ideal, which would be too purely 
intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness 
that Art becomes complete in beauty, and so ad- 
dresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor 
to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense 
alone, which, while accepting both reason and rec- 



148 INTENTIONS 

ognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates 
them both to a pure synthetic impression of the 
work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien 
emotional elements the work may possess, uses their 
very complexity as a means by which a richer unity 
may be added to the ultimate impression itself. 
You see, then, how it is that the aesthetic critic re- 
jects those obvious modes of art that have but 
one message to deliver, and having delivered it be- 
come dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such 
modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their 
imaginative beauty make all interpretations true 
and no interpretation final. Some resemblance, no 
doubt, the creative work of the critic will have to 
the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will 
be such resemblance as exists, not between Nature 
and the mirror that the painter of landscape or fig- 
ure may be supposed to hold up to her, but 
between Nature and the work of the decorative 
artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of Persia, 
tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to 
look on, though they are not reproduced in visible 
shape or line; just as the pearl and purple of the 
sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at 
Venice ; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous 
chapel of Ravenna is made gorgeous by the gold 
and green and sapphire of the peacock's tail, 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST I49 

though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the 
critic reproduces the work that he criticises in a 
mode that is never imitative, and part of whose 
charm may really consist in the rejection of resem- 
blance, and shows us in this way not merely the 
meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and, by 
transforming each art into literature, solves once for 
all the problem of Art's unity. 

But I see it is time for supper. After we have 
discussed some Chambertin and a few ortolans, we 
will pass on to the question of the critic considered 
in the light of the interpreter. 

Ernest. Ah ! you admit, then, that the critic may 
occasionally be allowed to see the object as in itself 
it really is. 

Gilbert. I am not quite sure. Perhaps, I may 
admit it after supper. There is a subtle influence 
in supper. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 

WITH SOME REMARKS UPON THE 

IMPORTANCE OF DISCUSSING 

EVERYTHING 



HA DIALOGUE. Part I L 
Persons : the same. Scene : 
the same. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 

Ernest. The ortolans were delightful, and the 
Chambertin perfect. And now let us return to the 
point at issue. 

Gilbert. Ah ! don't let us do that. Conversation 
should touch everything, but should concentrate it- 
self on nothing. Let us talk about Moral Indigna- 
tion, its Cause and Cure, a subject on which I think 
of writing : or about The Survival of Thersites, as 
shown by the English comic papers ; or about any 
topic that may turn up. 

Ernest. No : I want to discuss the critic and 
criticism. You have told me that the highest 
criticism deals with art, not as expressive, but as im- 
pressive purely, and is consequently both creative 
and independent — is, in fact, an art by itself, occu- 
pying the same relation to creative work that creative 
work does to the visible world of form and colour, 
or the unseen world of passion and of thought. 

153 



I 
154 INTENTIONS 

Well, now tell me, will not the critic be sometimes 
a real interpreter? 

Gilbert. Yes ; the critic will be an interpreter, if 
he chooses. He can pass from his synthetic im- 
pression of the work of art as a whole, to an analy- 
sis or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower 
sphere, as I hold it to be, there are many delightful 
things to be said and done. Yet his object will 
not always be to explain the work of art. He may 
seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, 
and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is 
dear to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary 
people are "terribly at ease in Zion." They pro- 
pose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a 
glib ignorant way of saying " Why should we read 
what is written about Shakespeare and Milton? 
We can read the plays and the poems. That is 
enough." But an appreciation of Milton is, as the 
late Rector of Lincoln remarked once, the reward 
of consummate scholarship. And he who desires 
to understand Shakespeare truly must understand 
the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the 
Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of 
Elizabeth and the age of James ; he must be famil- 
iar with the history of the struggle for supremacy 
between the old classical forms and the new spirit 
of romance, between the school of Sidney, and 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 155 

Daniel, and Jonson, and the school of Marlowe and 
Marlowe's greater son ; he must know the mate- 
rials that were at Shakespeare's disposal, and the 
method in which he used them, and the conditions 
of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth century, their limitations and their oppor- 
tunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of 
Shakespeare's day, its aim and modes and canons; 
he must study the English language in its progress, 
and blank or rhymed verse in its various develop- 
ments; he must study the Greek drama, and the 
connection between the art of the creator of the 
Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth ; 
in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan 
London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn 
Shakespeare's true position in the history of Euro- 
pean drama and the drama of the world. The 
critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not 
treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret 
may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are 
wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, 
he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery 
it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty 
his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes 
of men. 

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. 
The critic will indeed be an interpreter, but he will 



156 INTENTIONS 

not be an interpreter in the sense of one who sim- 
ply repeats in another form a message that has 
been put into his lips to say. For, just as it is 
only by contact with the art of foreign nations that 
the art of a country gains that individual and sep- 
arate life that we call nationality, so, by curious 
inversion, it is only by intensifying his own person- 
ality that the critic can interpret the personality 
and work of others, and the more strongly this 
personality enters into the interpretation the more 
real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfy- 
ing, the more convincing, and the more true. 

Ernest. I would have said that personality would 
have been a disturbing element. 

Gilbert. No ; it is an element of revelation. If 
you wish to understand others you must intensify 
your own individualism. 

Ernest. What, then, is the result? 

Gilbert. I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell 
you best by definite example. It seems to me 
that, while the literary critic stands of course first, 
as having the wider range, and larger vision, and 
nobler material, each of the arts has a critic, as it 
were, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the 
drama. He shows the poet's work under new con- 
ditions, and by a message special to himself. He 
takes the written word, and action, gesture, and 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 157 

voice become the media of revelation. The singer, 
or the player on lute and viol, is the critic of 
music. The etcher of a picture robs the painting 
of its fair colours, but shows us by the use of a 
new material its true colour-quality, its tones and 
values, and the relations of its masses, and so is, in 
his way, a critic of it, for the critic is he who ex- 
hibits to us a work of art in a form different from 
that of the work itself, and the employment of a 
new material is a critical as well as a creative ele- 
ment. Sculpture, too, has its critic, who may be 
either the carver of a gem, as he was in Greek 
days, or some painter like Mantegna, who sought 
to reproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line 
and the symphonic dignity of processional bas- 
relief. And in the case of all these creative critics 
of art it is evident that personality is an absolute 
essential for any real interpretation. When Rubin- 
stein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Bee- 
thoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but 
also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely 
— Beethoven reinterpreted through a rich artistic 
nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a 
new and intense personality. When a great actor 
plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. 
His own individuality becomes a vital part of 
the interpretation. People sometimes say that 



158 INTENTIONS 

actors give us their own Hamlets and not Shake- 
speare's; and this fallacy — for it is a fallacy — is, I 
regret to say, repeated by that charming and grace- 
ful writer who has lately deserted the turmoil of 
literature for the peace of the House of Commons — 
I mean the author of Obiter Dicta. In point of 
fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare's Ham- 
let. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness 
of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that 
belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as 
there are melancholies. 

Ernest. As many Hamlets as there are melan- 
cholies ? 

Gilbert. Yes : and as art springs from personality, 
so it is only to personality that it can be revealed, 
and from the meeting of the two comes right inter- 
pretative criticism. 

Ernest. The critic, then, considered as the inter- 
preter, will give no less than he receives, and lend as 
much as he borrows? 

Gilbert. He will be always showing us the work 
of art in some new relation to our age. He will al- 
ways be reminding us that great works of art are 
living things — are, in fact, the only things that live. 
So much, indeed, will he feel this, that I am certain 
that, as civilization progresses and we become more 
highly organized, the elect spirits of each age, the 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 59 

critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less 
interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their im- 
pressions almost entirely from what Art has touched. 
For Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastro- 
phes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong 
people. There is a grotesque horror about its come- 
dies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. 
One is always wounded when one approaches it. 
Things last either too long, or not long enough. 

Ernest. Poor life ! Poor human life ! Are you 
not even touched by the tears that the Roman poet 
tells us are part of its essence? 

Gilbert. Too quickly touched by them, I fear. For 
when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid 
in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent 
moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a 
dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things, 
but the passions that once burned one like fire? 
What are the incredible things, but the things that 
one has faithfully believed ? What are the improb- 
able things ? The things that one has done oneself. 
No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a 
puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives 
it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its 
train. We come across some noble grief that we 
think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our 
days, but it passes away from us, and things less 



l6o ' INTENTIONS 

noble take its place, and on some grey windy- 
dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we 
find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull 
heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that 
we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly 
kissed, 

Ernest. Life, then, is a failure ? 

Gilbert. From the artistic point of view, certainly. 
And the chief thing that makes hfe a failure from this 
artistic point of view is the thing that lends to life its 
sordid security, the fact that one can never repeat 
exactly the same emotion. How different it is in the 
world of Art! On a shelf of the bookcase behind 
you stands the Divine Comedy, and I know that, if I 
open it at a certain place, I shall be filled with a 
fierce hatred of some one who has never wronged me, 
or stirred by a great love for some one whom I shall 
never see. There is no mood or passion that Art 
cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered 
her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences 
are going to be. We can choose our day and select 
our hour. We can say to ourselves, " To-morrow, 
at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through 
the valley of the shadow of death," and lo! the 
dawn finds us in the obscure wood, and the Mantuan 
stands by our side. We pass through the gate of the 
legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy be- 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST l6l 

hold the horror of another world. The hypocrites 
go by, with their painted faces and their cowls of 
gilded lead. Out of the ceaseless winds that drive 
them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic 
rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain. 
We break the withered branches from the tree in the 
grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous 
twig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud 
with bitter cries. Out of a horn of fire Odysseus 
speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame 
the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs 
over the torture of that bed becomes ours for a mo- 
ment. Through the dim purple air fly those who 
have stained the world with the beauty of their 
sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy- 
stricken and swollen of body into the semblance of 
a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner 
of false coin. He bids us listen to his misery; we 
stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he 
dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water 
that in cool dewy channels gush down the green 
Casentine hills. Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, 
mocks at him. He smites him in the face, and they 
wrangle. We are fascinated by their shame, and 
loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that 
city turreted by giants where great Nimrod blows 
his horn. Terrible things are in store for us, and we 



1 62 INTENTIONS 

go to meet them in Dante's raiment and with Dante's 
heart. We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and 
Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy- 
waves. He calls to us, and we reject him. When 
we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and 
Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn. We 
tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in which trai- 
tors stick like straws in glass. Our foot strikes against 
the head of Bocca. He will not tell us his name, 
and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming 
skull. Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his 
face that he may weep a little. We pledge our 
word to him, and when he has uttered his dolorous 
tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and 
pass from him ; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, 
for who more base than he who has mercy for the 
condemned of God ? In the jaws of Lucifer we see 
the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer 
the men who slew Caesar. We tremble, and come 
forth to rebehold the stars. 

In the land of Purgation the air is freer, and the 
holy mountain rises into the pure light of day. There 
is peace for us, and for those who for a season abide 
in it there is some peace also, though, pale from the 
poison of the Maremma, Madonna Pia passes before 
us, and Ismene, with the sorrow of earth still linger- 
ing about her, is there. Soul after soul makes us 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 63 

share in some repentance or some' joy. He whom 
the mourning of his widow taught to drink the sweet 
wormwood of pain, tells us of Nella praying in her 
lonely bed, and we learn from the mouth of Buon- 
conte how a single tear may save a dying sinner from 
the fiend. Sordello, that noble and disdainful Lom- 
bard, eyes us from afar like a couchant lion. When 
he learns that Virgil is one of Mantua's citizens, he 
falls upon his neck, and when he learns that he is the 
singer of Rome he falls before his feet. In that val- 
ley whose grass and flowers are fairer than cleft 
emerald and Indian wood, and brighter than scarlet 
and silver, they are singing who in the world were 
kings ; but the lips of Rudolph of Hapsburg do not 
move to the music of the others, and Philip of France 
beats his breast and Henry of England sits alone. 
On and on we go, climbing the marvellous stair, and 
the stars become larger than their wont, and the song 
of the kings grows faint, and at length we reach the 
seven trees of gold and the garden of the Earthly 
Paradise. In a grifhn-drawn chariot appears one 
whose brows are bound with olive, who is veiled in 
white, and mantled in green, and robed in a vesture 
that is coloured like live fire. The ancient flame 
wakes within us. Our blood quickens through ter- 
rible pulses. We recognize her. It is Beatrice, the wo- 
man we have worshipped. The ice congealed about 



1 64 INTENTIONS 

our heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from 
us, and we bow our forehead to the ground, for we 
know that we have sinned. When we have done pen- 
ance, and are purified, and have drunk of the foun- 
tain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, 
the mistress of our soul raises us to the Paradise of 
Heaven. Out of that eternal pearl, the moon, the 
face of Piccarda Donati leans to us. Her beauty 
troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing that 
falls through water, she passes away, we gaze after 
her with wistful eyes. The sweet planet of Venus 
is full of lovers. Cunizza, the sister of Ezzelin, the 
lady of Sordello's heart, is there, and Folco, the pas- 
sionate singer of Provence, who in sorrow for Azalais 
forsook the world, and the Canaanitish harlot whose 
soul was the first that Christ redeemed. Joachim of 
Flora stands in the sun, and, in the sun, Aquinas 
recounts the story of St. Francis and Bonaventure 
the story of St. Dominic. Through the burning 
rubies of Mars, Cacciaguida approaches. He tells 
us of the arrow that is shot from the bow of exile, and 
how salt tastes the bread of another, and how steep 
are the stairs in the house of a stranger. In Saturn 
the souls sing not, and even she who guides us dare 
not smile. On a ladder of gold the flames rise and 
fall. At last, we see the pageant of the Mystical 
Rose. Beatrice fixes her eyes upon the face of God, 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 65 

to turn them not again. The beatific vision is granted 
to us ; we know the Love that moves the sun and all 
the stars. 

Yes, we can put the earth back six hundred courses 
and make ourselves one with the great Florentine, 
kneel at the same altar with him, and share his rap- 
ture and his scorn. And if we grow tired of an antique 
time, and desire to realize our own age in all its 
weariness and sin, are there not books that can make 
us live more in one single hour than life can make us 
live in a score of shameful years? Close to your 
hand lies a little volume, bound in some Nile-green 
skin that has been powdered with gilded nenuphars 
and smoothed with hard ivory. It is the book that 
Gautier loved, it is Baudelaire's masterpiece. Open 
it at that sad madrigal that begins 

" Que m'importe que tu sois sage? 
Sois belle ! et sois triste ! " 

and you will find yourself worshipping sorrow as 
you have never worshipped joy. Pass on to the 
poem on the man who tortures himself, let its subtle 
music steal into your brain and colour your thoughts, 
and you will become for a moment what he was who 
wrote it ; nay, not for a moment only, but for many 
barren moonlit nights and sunless sterile days will a 
despair that is not your own make its dwelHng within 



1 66 INTENTIONS 

you, and the misery of another gnaw your heart 
away. Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one 
of its secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow 
eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous 
honey, and seek to repent of strange crimes of which 
it is guiltless, and to make atonement for terrible 
pleasures that it has never known. And then, when 
you are tired of these flowers of evil, turn to the 
flowers that grow in the garden of Perdita, and in 
their dew-drenched chalices cool your fevered brow, 
and let their loveliness heal and restore your soul ; 
or wake from his forgotten tomb the sweet Syrian, 
Meleager, and bid the lover of Heliodore make you 
music, for he too has flowers in his song, red pome- 
granate-blossoms, and irises that smell of myrrh, 
ringed daffodils and dark-blue hyacinths, and mar- 
joram and crinkled ox-eyes. Dear to him was the 
perfume of the bean-field at evening, and dear to him 
the odorous eared-spikenard that grew on the Syrian 
hills, and the fresh green thyme, the wine-cup's 
charm. The feet of his love as she walked in the 
garden were like lilies set upon lilies. Softer than 
sleep-laden poppy-petals were her lips, softer than 
violets and as scented. The flame-like crocus sprang 
from the grass to look at her. For her the slim 
narcissus stored the cool rain ; and for her the 
anemones forgot the Sicilian winds that wooed 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 67 

them. And neither crocus, nor anemone, nor nar- 
cissus was as fair as she was. 

It is a strange thing, this transference of emotion. 
We sicken with the same maladies as the poets, and 
the singer lends us his pain. Dead lips have their 
message for us, and hearts that have fallen to dust 
can communicate their joy. We run to kiss the 
bleeding mouth of Fantine, and we follow Manon 
Lescaut over the whole world. Ours is the love- 
madness of the Tyrian, and the terror of Orestes is 
ours also. There is no passion that we cannot feel, 
no pleasure that we may not gratify, and we can 
choose the time of our initiation and the time of 
our freedom also. Life! Life! Don't let us go to 
life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing 
narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utter- 
ance, and without that fine correspondence of form 
and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy 
the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us 
pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase 
the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous 
and infinite. 

Ernest. Must we go, then, to Art for everything? 

Gilbert. For everything. Because Art does not 

hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a 

type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the 

function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are 



1 68 INTENTIONS 

not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. 
In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says 
somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection. But 
the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and 
initiates, if I may quote once more from the great 
art-critic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and 
through Art only, that we can realize our perfec- 
tion; through Art, and through Art only, that we 
can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual 
existence. This results not merely from the fact 
Uhat nothing that one can imagine is worth doing, 
and that one can imagine everything, but from the 
subtle law that emotional forces, like the forces of 
the physical sphere, are limited in extent and energy. 
One can feel so much, and no more. And how can 
it matter with what pleasure life tries to tempt one, 
or with what pain it seeks to maim and mar one's 
soul, if in the spectacle of the lives of those who have 
never existed one has found the true secret of joy, 
and wept away one's tears over their deaths who, 
like Cordelia and the daughter of Brabantio, can 
never die? 

Ernest. Stop a moment. It seems to me that in 
everything that you have said there is something 
radically immoral. 

Gilbert. All art is immoral. 
Ernest. All art? 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 69 

Gilbert. Yes. For emotion for the sake of 
emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake 
of action is the aim of hfe, and of that practical 
organization of life that we call society. Society, 
which is the beginning and basis of morals, exists 
simply for the concentration of human energy, and 
in order to ensure its own continuance and healthy 
stability it demands, and no doubt rightly demands, 
of each of its citizens that he should contribute some 
form of productive labor to the common weal, and 
toil and travail that the day's work may be done. 
Society often forgives the criminal ; it never forgives 
the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that 
art excites in us, are hateful in its eyes, and so 
completely are people dominated by the tyranny of 
this dreadful social ideal that they are always com- 
ing shamelessly up to one at Private Views and 
other places that are open to the general public, 
and saying in a loud stentorian voice, " What are 
you doing?" whereas "What are you thinking?" 
is the only question that any single civilized being 
should ever be allowed to whisper to another. They 
mean well, no doubt, these honest beaming folk. 
Perhaps that is the reason why they are so ex- 
cessively tedious. But some one should teach them 
that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation 
is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, 



1 70 INTENTIONS 

in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper 
occupation of man. 

Ernest. Contemplation ? 

Gilbert. Contemplation. I said to you some time 
ago that it was far more difficult to talk about a 
thing than to do it. Let me say to you now that 
to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the 
world, the most difficult and the most intellectual. 
To Plato, with his passion for wisdom, this was the 
noblest form of energy. To Aristotle, with his 
passion for knowledge, this was the noblest form of 
energy also. It was to this that the passion for 
holiness led the saint and the mystic of mediaeval 
days. 

Ernest. We exist, then, to do nothing? 

Gilbert. It is to do nothing that the elect exist. 
Action is hmited and relative. Unlimited and ab- 
solute is the vision of him who sits at ease and 
watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams. But 
we who are born at the close of this wonderful age, 
are at once too cultured and too critical, too intel- 
lectually subtle and too curious of exquisite plea- 
sures, to accept any speculations about life in ex- 
change for life itself. To us the ' citta divina ' is 
colourless, and the ' fruitio Dei ' without meaning. 
Metaphysics do not satisfy our temperaments, and 
religious ecstasy is out of date. The world through 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 17I 

which the Academic philosopher becomes " the 
spectator of all time and of all existence " is not 
really an ideal world, but simply a world of abstract 
ideas. When we enter it, we starve amidst the chill 
mathematics of thought. The courts of the city of 
God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded 
by Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surren- 
der all that in our nature is most divine. It is 
enough that our fathers believed. They have ex- 
hausted the faith-faculty of the species. Their 
legacy to us is the scepticism of which they were 
afraid. Had they put it into words, it might not 
live within us as thought. No, Ernest, no. We 
cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to 
be learned from the sinner. We cannot go back to 
the philosopher, and the mystic leads us astray. 
Who, as Mr. Pater suggests somewhere, would ex- 
change the curve of a single rose-leaf for that form- 
less intangible Being which Plato rates so high? 
What to us is the Illumination of Philo, the Abyss 
of Eckhart, the Vision of Bohme, the monstrous 
Heaven itself that was revealed to Swedenborg's 
blinded eyes? Such things are less than the yellow 
trumpet of one daffodil of the field, far less than the 
meanest of the visible arts; for, just as Nature is 
matter struggling into mind, so Art is mind ex- 
pressing itself under the conditions of matter, and 



1 72 INTENTIONS 

thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she 
speaks to both sense and soul alike. To the aesthetic 
temperament the vague is always repellent. The 
Greeks were a nation of artists, because they were 
spared the sense of the infinite. Like Aristotle, 
like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the 
concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy 
us. 

Ernest. What then do you propose? 

Gilbert. It seems to me that with the develop- 
ment of the critical spirit we shall be able to realize, 
not merely our own lives, but the collective life of 
the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely 
modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity. 
For he to whom the present is the only thing that 
is present, knows nothing of the age in which he 
lives. To realize the nineteenth century, one must 
realize every century that has preceded it and that 
has contributed to its making. To know anything 
about oneself, one must know all about others. 
There must be no mood with which one cannot 
sympathize, no dead mode of life that one cannot 
make alive. Is this impossible? I think not. By 
revealing to us the absolute mechanism of all ac- 
tion, and so freeing us from the self-imposed and 
trammelling burden of moral responsibility, the 
scientific principle of Heredity has become, as it 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 173 

were, the warrant for the contemplative Hfe. It has 
shown us that we are never less free than when we 
try to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets 
of the hunter, and written upon the wall the pro- 
phecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is 
within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror 
that mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis without her 
mask. It is the last of the Fates, and the most ter- 
rible. It is the only one of the Gods whose real 
name we know. 

And yet, while in the sphere of practical and ex- 
ternal life it has robbed energy of its freedom and 
activity of its choice, in the subjective sphere, 
where the soul is at work, it comes to us, this ter- 
rible shadow, with many gifts in its hands, gifts of 
strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, 
gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference, 
complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at 
variance with each other, and passions that war 
against themselves. And so, it is not our own life 
that we Hve, but the lives of the dead, and the soul 
that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, 
making us personal and individual, created for our 
service, and entering into us for our joy. It is 
something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in 
ancient sepulchres has made its abode. It is sick 
with many maladies, and has memories of curious 



1 74 INTENTIONS 

sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is 
bitter. It fills us with impossible desires, and 
makes us follow what we know we cannot gain. 
One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us. 
It can lead us away from surroundings whose 
beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of familiar- 
ity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims 
are marring the perfection of our development. It 
can help us to leave the age in which we were born, 
and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not 
exiled from their air. It can teach us how to escape 
from our experience, and to realize the experiences 
of those who are greater than we are. The pain of 
Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. 
Theocritus blows on his pipe, and we laugh with 
the lips of nymph and shepherd. In the wolfskin 
of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in 
the armour of Lancelot we ride from the bower of 
the Queen. We have whispered the secret of our 
love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained 
raiment of Villon have put our shame into song. 
We can see the dawn through Shelley's eyes, and 
when we wander with Endymion the Moon grows 
amorous of our youth. Ours is the anguish of 
Atys, and ours the weak rage and noble sorrows of 
the Dane. Do you think that it is the imagination 
that enables us to live these countless lives ? Yes : 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1/5 

it is the imagination; and the imagination is the 
result of heredity. It is simply concentrated race- 
experience. 

Ernest. But where in this is the function of the 
critical spirit? 

Gilbert. The culture that this transmission of 
racial experiences makes possible can be made per- 
fect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be 
said to be one with it. For who is the true critic 
but he who bears within himself the dreams, and 
ideas, and feelings of myriad generations, and to 
whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional im- 
pulse obscure? And who the true man of culture, 
if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious re- 
jection has made instinct self-conscious and intelli- 
eent, and can separate the work that has distinction 
from the work that has it not, and so by contact 
and comparison makes himself master of the secrets 
of style and school, and understands their meanings, 
and listens to their voices, and develops that spirit of 
disinterested curiosity which is the real root, as it is 
the real flower, of the intellectual life, and thus at- 
tains to intellectual clarity, and, having learned 
" the best that is known and thought in the world," 
lives — it is not fanciful to say so — with those who 
are the Immortals. 

Yes, Ernest : the contemplative life, the life that 



176 INTENTIONS 

has for its aim not doing but being, and not being 
merely, but becoming — that is what the critical 
spirit can give us. The gods live thus : either 
brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle 
tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with 
the calm eyes of the spectator the tragi-comedy of 
the world that they have made. We, too, might 
live like them, and set ourselves to witness with 
appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man 
and nature afford. We might make ourselves 
spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and 
become perfect by the rejection of energy. It- has 
often seemed to me that Browning felt something 
of this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into active 
life, and makes him realize his mission by effort. 
Browning might have given us a Hamlet who 
would have realized his mission by thought. Inci- 
dent and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. 
He made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, 
and looked on action as the one undramatic ele- 
ment of a play. To us, at any rate, the BIOS 
©ES^PHTIKOS is the true ideal. From the high 
tower of Thought we can look out at the world. 
Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic 
critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a 
venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. 
He at least is safe. He has discovered how to 
live. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 177 

Is such a mode of life immoral ? Yes : all the 
arts are immoral, except those baser forms of sen- 
sual or didactic art that seek to excite to action of 
evil or of good. For action of every kind belongs 
to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to 
create a mood. Is such a mode of life unpractical ? 
Ah ! it is not so easy to be unpractical as the 
ignorant Philistine imagines. It were well for Eng- 
land if it were so. There is no country in the 
world so much in need of unpractical people as 
this country of ours. With us, Thought is de- 
graded by its constant association with practice. 
Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual 
existence, noisy politician, or brawling social re- 
former, or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by 
the sufferings of that unimportant section of the 
community among whom he has cast his lot, can 
seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested 
intellectual judgment about any one thing? Each 
of the professions means a prejudice. The neces- 
sity for a career forces every one to take sides. 
We live in the age of the overworked, and the 
under-educated; the age in which people are so 
industrious that they become absolutely stupid. 
And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot help say- 
ing that such people deserve their doom. • The 
sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to 
make oneself useful. 



1 78 INTENTIONS 

Ernest. A charming doctrine, Gilbert. 

Gilbert. I am not sure about that, but it has at 
least the minor merit of being true. That the de- 
sire to do good to others produces a plentiful crop 
of prigs is the least of the evils of which it is the 
cause. The prig is a very interesting psychological 
study, and though of all poses a moral pose is the most 
offensive, still to have a pose at all is something. 
It is a formal recognition of the importance of 
treating life from a definite and reasoned stand- 
point. That Humanitarian Sympathy wars against 
Nature, by securing the survival of the failure, may 
make the man of science loathe its facile virtues. 
The political economist may cry out against it for 
putting the improvident on the same level as the 
provident, and so robbing life of the strongest, 
because most sordid, incentive to industry. But, 
in the eyes of the thinker, the real harm that emo- 
tional sympathy does is that it limits knowledge, 
and so prevents us from solving any single social 
problem. We are trying at present to stave off the 
coming crisis, the coming revolution, as my friends, 
the Fabianists, call it, by means of doles and alms. 
Well, when the revolution or crisis arrives we shall 
be powerless because we shall know nothing. And 
so, Ernest, let us not be deceived. England will 
never be civilized till she has added Utopia to her 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 179 

dominions. There is more than one of her colonies 
that she might with advantage surrender for so fair 
a land. What we want are unpractical people who 
see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day. 
Those who try to lead the people can only do so 
by following the mob. It is through the voice of 
one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the 
gods must be prepared. 

But perhaps you think that in beholding for the 
mere joy of beholding, and contemplating for the 
sake of contemplation, there is something that is 
egotistic. If you think so, do not say so. It takes 
a thoroughly selfish age, like our own, to deify self- 
sacrifice. It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such 
as that in which we live, to set above the fine intel- 
lectual virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues 
that are an immediate practical benefit to itself. They 
miss their aim, too, these philanthropists and senti- 
mentalists of our day, who are always chattering to 
one about one's duty to one's neighbour. For the 
development of the race depends on the develop- 
ment of the individual, and where self-culture has 
ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is 
instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. If 
you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in 
educating himself — a rare type in our time, I 
admit, but still one occasionally to be met with — 



1 80 INTENTIONS 

you rise from table richer, and conscious that a 
high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified 
your days. But, oh! my dear Ernest, to sit next 
a man who has spent his life in trying to educate 
others! What a dreadful experience that is! 
How appalling is that ignorance which is the in- 
evitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opin- 
ions! How limited in range the creature's mind 
proves to be ! How it wearies us, and must weary 
himself, with its endless repetitions and sickly re- 
iteration! How lacking it is in any element of 
intellectual growth! In what a vicious circle it 
always moves ! 

Ernest. You speak with strange feeling, Gilbert. 
Have you had this dreadful experience, as you call 
it, lately? 

Gilbert. Few of us escape it. People say that 
the schoolmaster is abroad. I wish to goodness 
he were. But the type of which, after all, he is 
only one, and certainly the least important, of the 
representatives, seems to me to be really domi- 
nating our lives; and just as the philanthropist is 
the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance 
of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occu- 
pied in trying to educate others, that he has never 
had any time to educate himself. No, Ernest, 
self-culture is the true ideal of man. Goethe saw 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST l8l 

it, and the immediate debt that we owe to Goethe 
is greater than the debt we owe to any man since 
Greek days. The Greeks saw it, and have left us, 
as their legacy to modern thought, the conception 
of the contemplative life as well as the critical 
method by which alone can that life be truly real- 
ized. It was the one thing that made the Renais- 
sance great, and gave us Humanism. It is the one 
thing that could make our own age great also ; for 
the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete 
armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty 
that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunken- 
ness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in 
the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intel- 
lectual. 

I do not deny that the intellectual ideal is diffi- 
cult of attainment, still less that it is, and perhaps 
will be for years to come, unpopular with the crowd. 
It is so easy for people to have sympathy with suf- 
fering. It is so difficult for them to have sympathy 
with thought. Indeed, so little do ordinary people 
understand what thought really is, that they seem 
to imagine that, when they have said that a theory 
is dangerous, they have pronounced its condemna- 
tion, whereas it is only such theories that have any 
true intellectual value. An idea that is not dan- 
gerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. 



1 82 INTENTIONS 

Ernest. Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told 
me that all art is, in its essence, immoral. Are you 
going to tell me now that all thought is, in its essence, 
dangerous ? 

Gilbert. Yes, in the practical sphere it is so. The 
security of society lies in custom and unconscious in- 
stinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a 
healthy organism, is the complete absence of any in- 
telligence amongst its members. The great majority 
of people, being fully aware of this, rank themselves 
naturally on the side of that splendid system that 
elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage 
so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual 
faculty into any question that concerns life, that one 
is tempted to define man as a rational animal who 
always loses his temper when he is called upon to act 
in accordance with the dictates of reason. But let 
us turn from the practical sphere, and say no more 
about the wicked philanthropists, who, indeed, may 
well be left to the mercy of the almond-eyed sage of 
the Yellow River, Chuang Tsu the wise, who has 
proved that such well-meaning and offensive busy- 
bodies have destroyed the simple and spontaneous 
virtue that there is in man. They are a wearisome 
topic, and I am anxious to get back to the sphere in 
which criticism is free. 

Ernest. The sphere of the intellect? 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 83 

Gilbert. Yes. You remember that I spoke of the 
critic as being in his own way as creative as the 
artist, whose work, indeed, may be merely of value in 
so far as it gives to the critic a suggestion for some 
new mood of thought and feeling which he can real- 
ize with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of 
form, and, through the use of a fresh medium of ex- 
pression, make differently beautiful and more per- 
fect. Well, you seemed to me to be a little scepti- 
cal about the theory. But perhaps I wronged you ? 

Ernest. I am not really sceptical about it, but I 
must admit that I feel very strongly that such work 
as you describe the critic producing — and creative 
such work must undoubtedly be admitted to be — is, 
of necessity, purely subjective, whereas the greatest 
work is objective always, objective and impersonal. 

Gilbert. The difference between objective and sub- 
jective work is one of external form merely. It is 
accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is ab- 
solutely subjective. The very landscape that Corot 
looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his 
own mind ; and those great figures of Greek or Eng- 
lish drama that seem to us to possess an actual ex- 
istence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped 
and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, 
simply the poets themselves, not as they thought 
they were, but as they thought they were not ; and 



1 84 INTENTIONS 

by such thinking came in strange manner, though 
but for a moment, really so to be. For out of our- 
selves we can never pass, nor can there be in creation 
what in the creator was not. Nay, I would say that 
the more objective a creation appears to be, the more 
subjective it really is. Shakespeare might have met 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of 
London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite 
their thumbs at each other in the open square ; but 
Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his 
passion. They were elements of his nature to which 
he gave visible form, impulses that stirred so strongly 
within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer 
them to realize their energy, not on the lower plane 
of actual life, where they would have been tram- 
melled and constrained and so made imperfect, but on 
that imaginative plane of art where Love can indeed 
find in Death its rich fulfilment, where one can stab 
the eavesdropper behind the arras, and wrestle in a 
new-made grave, and make a guilty king drink his 
own hurt, and see one's father's spirit, beneath the 
glimpses of the moon, stalking in complete steel 
from misty wall to wall. Action being limited would 
have left Shakespeare unsatisfied and unexpressed; 
and, just as it is because he did nothing that he has 
been able to achieve everything, so it is because he 
never speaks to us of himself in his plays that his 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 85 

plays reveal him to us absolutely, and show us his 
true nature and temperament far more completely 
than do those strange and exquisite sonnets, even, 
in which he bares to crystal eyes the secret closet of 
his heart. Yes, the objective form is the most sub- 
jective in matter. Man is least himself when he 
talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he 
will tell you the truth. 

Ernest. The critic, then, being limited to the sub- 
jective form, will necessarily be less able to fully ex- 
press himself than the artist, who has always at his 
disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective. 

Gilbert. Not necessarily, and certainly not at all if 
he recognizes that each mode of criticism is, in its 
highest development, simply a mood, and that we 
are never more true to ourselves than when we are 
inconsistent. The aesthetic critic, constant only to 
the principle of beauty in all things, will ever be look- 
ing for fresh impressions, winning from the various 
schools the secret of their charm, bowing, it may be, 
before foreign altars, or smiling, if it be his fancy, at 
strange new gods. What other people call one's past 
has, no doubt, everything to do with them, but has 
absolutely nothing to do with oneself. The man 
who regards his past is a man who deserves to have 
no future to look forward to. When one has found 
expression for a mood, one has done with it. You 



1 86 INTENTIONS 

laugh ; but believe me it is so. Yesterday it was 
Realism that charmed one. One gained from it that 
' nouveau frisson * which it was its aim to produce. 
One analysed it, explained it, and wearied of it. At 
sunset came the ' Luministe ' in painting, and the 
' Symboliste ' in poetry, and the spirit of mediae- 
valism, that spirit which belongs not to time but to 
temperament, woke suddenly in wounded Russia, 
and stirred us for a moment by the terrible fascina- 
tion of pain. To-day the cry is for Romance, and 
already the leaves are tremulous in the valley, and on 
the purple hill-tops walks Beauty with slim gilded 
feet. The old modes of creation linger, of course. 
The artists reproduce either themselves or each 
other, with wearisome iteration. But Criticism is 
always moving on, and the critic is always develop- 
ing. 

Nor, again, is the critic really limited to the sub- 
jective form of expression. The method of the drama 
is his, as well as the method of the epos. He may 
use dialogue, as he did who set Milton talking to 
Marvel on the nature of comedy and tragedy, and 
made Sidney and Lord Brooke discourse on letters 
beneath the Penshurst oaks ; or adopt narration, as 
Mr. Pater is fond of doing, each of whose Imaginary 
Portraits — is not that the title of the book? — pre- 
sents to us, under the fanciful guise of fiction, some 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 8/ 

fine and exquisite piece of criticism, one on the 
painter Watteau, another on the philosophy of 
Spinoza, a third on the Pagan elements of the early- 
Renaissance, and the last, and in some respects the 
most suggestive, on the source of that Aufklarung, 
that enlightening which dawned on Germany in the 
last century, and to which our own culture owes so 
great a debt. Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful 
literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from 
Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that 
grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, 
the creative critics of the world have always em- 
ployed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction 
as a mode of expression. By its means he can both 
reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every 
fancy, and reality to every mood. By its means he 
can exhibit the object from each point of view, and 
show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us 
things, gaining in this manner all the richness and 
reality of effect that comes from those side issues 
that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in 
its progress, and really illumine the idea more com- 
pletely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that 
give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, 
and yet convey something of the delicate charm of 
chance. 

Ernest. By its means, too, he can invent an 



1 88 INTENTIONS 

imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he 
chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument. 

Gilbert. Ah ! it is so easy to convert others. It is 
so difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what 
one really believes, one must speak through lips 
different from one's own. To know the truth one 
must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is 
Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the 
opinion that has survived. In matters of science, 
it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is 
one's last mood. And you see now, Ernest, that 
the critic has at his disposal as many objective 
forms of expression as the artist has. Ruskin put 
his criticism into imaginative prose, and is superb 
in his changes and contradictions ; and Browning 
put his into blank verse, and made painter and 
poet yield us their secret ; and M. Renan uses dia- 
logue, and Mr. Pater fiction, and Rossetti translated 
into sonnet-music the colour of Giorgione and the 
design of Ingres, and his own design and colour 
also, feeling, with the instinct of one who had many 
modes of utterance, that the ultimate art is litera- 
ture, and the finest and fullest medium that of words. 

Ernest. Well, now that you have settled that the 
critic has at his disposal all objective forms, I wish 
you would tell me what are the qualities that should 
characterize the true critic. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 89 

Gilbert. What would you say they were ? 

Ernest. Well, I should say that a critic should 
above all things be fair. 

Gilbert. Ah! not fair. A critic cannot be fair in 
the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about 
things that do not interest one that one can give a 
really unbiassed opinion, which is no doubt the 
reason why an unbiassed opinion is always abso- 
lutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of 
a question, is a man who sees absolutely nothing at 
all. Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, 
Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so 
is fluid rather than fixed, and, depending upon fiine 
moods and exquisite moments, cannot be narrowed 
into the rigidity of a scientific formula or a theo- 
logical dogma. It is to the soul that Art speaks, 
and the soul may be made the prisoner of the mind 
as well as of the body. One should, of course, 
have no prejudices ; but, as a great Frenchman re- 
marked a hundred years ago, it is one's business in 
such matters to have preferences, and when one 
has preferences one ceases to be fair. It is only an 
auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire 
all schools of Art. No : fairness is not one of the 
qualities of the true critic. It is not even a condi- 
tion of criticism. Each form of Art with which we 
come in contact dominates us for the moment to the 



IQO INTENTIONS 

exclusion of every other form. We must surrender 
ourselves absolutely to the work in question, what- 
ever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret. For 
the time, we must think of nothing else, can think 
of nothing else, indeed. 

Ernest. The true critic will be rational, at any 
rate, will he not? 

Gilbert. Rational? There are two ways of dis- 
liking art, Ernest. One is to dislike it. The other, 
to like it rationally. For Art, as Plato saw, and 
not without regret, creates in listener and spectator 
a form of divine madness. It does not spring from 
inspiration, but it makes others inspired. Reason 
is not the faculty to which it appeals. If one loves 
Art at all, one must love it beyond all other things 
in the world, and against such love, the reason, if 
one listened to it, would cry out. There is nothing 
sane about the worship of beauty. It is too splen- 
did to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the 
dominant note will always seem to the world to be 
pure visionaries. 

Ernest. Well, at least, the critic will be sincere. 

Gilbert. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, 
and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. The true 
critic will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion 
to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for 
beauty in every age and in each school, and will 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST I9I 

never suffer himself to be limited to any settled 
custom of thought, or stereotyped mode of looking 
at things. He will realize himself in many forms, 
and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be 
curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. 
Through constant change, and through constant 
change alone, he will find his true unity. He will 
not consent to be the slave of his own opinions. 
For what is mind but motion in the intellectual 
sphere ? The essence of thought, as the essence of 
life, is growth. You must not be frightened by 
words, Ernest. What people call insincerity is 
simply a method by which we can multiply our 
personalities. 

Ernest. I am afraid I have not been fortunate in 
my suggestions. 

Gilbert. Of the three qualifications you men- 
tioned, two, sincerity and fairness, were, if not 
actually moral, at least on the border-land of morals, 
and the first condition of criticism is that the critic 
should be able to recognize that the sphere of Art 
and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and 
separate. When they are confused. Chaos has 
come again. They are too often confused in Eng- 
land now, and though our modern Puritans cannot 
destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their 
extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint 



192 INTENTIONS 

beauty for a moment. It is chiefly, I regret to 
say, through journalism that such people find ex- 
pression. I regret it because there is much to be 
said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us 
the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch 
with the ignorance of the community. By carefully 
chronicling the current events of contemporary 
life, it shows us of what very little importance such 
events really are. By invariably discussing the un- 
necessary, it makes us understand what things are 
requisite for culture, and what are not. But it 
should not allow poor Tartuffe to write articles 
upon modern art. When it does this it stultifies 
itself. And yet Tartuffe's articles, and Chadband's 
notes, do this good, at least. They serve to show 
how extremely limited is the area over which 
ethics, and ethical considerations, can claim to 
exercise influence. Science is out of the reach of 
morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. 
Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are 
fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever- 
changing. To morals belong the lower and less 
intellectual spheres. However, let these mouthing 
Puritans pass ; they have their comic side. Who 
can help laughing when an ordinary journalist 
seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the 
disposal of the artist? Some limitation might 



THE :ritic as artist 193 

well, and will soon, I hope, be placed upon some 
of our newspapers and newspaper writers. For they 
give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. 
They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of 
the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of 
the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of 
the doings of people of absolutely no interest what- 
soever. But the artist, who accepts the facts of 
life, and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty, 
and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and 
shows their colour-element, and their wonder, and 
their true ethical import also, and builds out of 
them a world more real than reality itself, and of 
loftier and more noble import — who shall set limits 
to him ? Not the apostles of that new Journalism 
which is but the old vulgarity "writ large." Not 
the apostles of that new Puritanism, which is but 
the whine of the hypocrite, and is both writ and 
spoken badly. The mere suggestion is ridiculous. 
Let us leave these wicked people, and proceed to 
the discussion of the artistic qualifications necessary 
for the true critic. 

Ernest. And what are they? Tell me yourself. 

Gilbert. Temperament is the primary requisite for 
the critic — a temperament exquisitely susceptible to 
beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty 
gives us. Under what conditions, and by what 



194 INTENTIONS 

means, this temperament is engendered in race or 
individual, we will not discu.'S at present. It is 
sufficient to note that it exists, and that there is in us 
a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and 
above them, separate from the reason and of nobler 
import, separate from the soul and of equal value — 
a sense that leads some to create, and others, the 
finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely. 
But to be purified and made perfect, this sense 
requires some form of exquisite environment. With- 
out this it starves, or is dulled. You remember 
that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a 
young Greek should be educated, and with what 
insistence he dwells upon the importance of sur- 
roundings, telling us how the lad is to be brought 
up in the midst of fair sights and sounds, so that 
the beauty of material things may prepare his soul 
for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual. 
Insensibly, and without knowing the reason why, he 
is to develop that real love of beauty which, as Plato 
is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of 
education. By slow degrees there is to be en- 
gendered in him such a temperament as will lead 
him naturally and simply to choose the good in 
preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is 
vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive 
taste all that possesses grace and charm and loveli- 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST I95 

ness. Ultimately, in its due course, this taste is to 
become critical and self-conscious, but at first it 
is to exist purely as a cultivated instinct, and " he 
who has received this true culture of the inner man 
will with clear and certain vision perceive the omis- 
sions and faults in art or nature, and with a taste 
that cannot err, while he praises, and finds his plea- 
sure in what is good, and receives it into his soul, and 
so becomes good and noble, he will rightly blame 
and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even 
before he is able to know the reason why : " and so, 
when, later on, the critical and self-conscious spirit 
develops in him, he " will recognize and salute it as 
a friend with whom his education has made him long 
familiar." I need hardly say, Ernest, how far we in 
England have fallen short of this ideal, and I can 
imagine the smile that would illuminate the glossy 
face of the Philistine if one ventured to suggest to 
him that the true aim of education was the love of 
beauty, and that the methods by which education 
should work were the development of temperament, 
the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the crit- 
ical spirit. 

Yet, even for us, there is left some loveliness of 
environment, and the dulness of tutors and profes- 
sors matters very little when one can loiter in the 
grey cloisters at Magdalen, and listen to some flute- 



196 INTENTIONS 

like voice singing in Waynfleete's chapel, or lie in 
the green meadow, among the strange snake-spotted 
fritillaries, and watch the sunburnt noon smite to a 
finer gold the tower's gilded vanes, or wander up the 
Christ Church staircase beneath the vaulted ceiling's 
shadowy fans, or pass through the sculptured gate- 
way of Laud's building in the College of St. John. 
Nor is it merely at Oxford, or Cambridge, that the 
sense of beauty can be formed and trained and per- 
fected. All over England there is a Renaissance of 
the decorative Arts. Ugliness has had its day. 
Even in the houses of the rich there is taste, and the 
houses of those who are not rich have been made 
gracious and comely and sweet to live in. Caliban, 
poor noisy Caliban, thinks that when he has ceased 
to make mows at a thing, the thing ceases to exist. 
But if he mocks no longer, it is because he has been 
met with mockery, swifter and keener than his own, 
and for a moment has been bitterly schooled into 
that silence which should seal for ever his uncouth 
distorted lips. What has been done up to now, has 
been chiefly in the clearing of the way. It is always 
more difficult to destroy than it is to create, and when 
what one has to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity, 
the task of destruction needs not merely courage but 
also contempt. Yet it seems to me to have been, in 
a measure, done. We have got rid of what was bad. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 1 97 

We have now to make what is beautiful. And 
though the mission of the aesthetic movement is to 
lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to 
create, yet, as the creative instinct is strong in the 
Celt, and it is the Celt who leads in art, there is no 
reason why in future years this strange Renaissance 
should not become almost as mighty in its way as 
was that new birth of Art that woke many centuries 
ago in the cities of Italy. 

Certainly, for the cultivation of temperament, we 
must turn to the decorative arts : to the arts that 
touch us, not to the arts that teach us. Modern 
pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At 
least, some of them are. But they are quite impos- 
sible to live with ; they are too clever, too assertive, 
too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and 
their method too clearly defined. One exhausts 
what they have to say in a very short time, and 
then they become as tedious as one's relations. I 
am very fond of the work of many of the Impres- 
sionist painters of Paris and London. Subtlety and 
distinction have not yet left the school. Some of 
their arrangements and harmonies serve to remind 
one of the unapproachable beauty of Gautier's 
immortal Symphonie en Blanc Majeur, that flawless 
masterpiece of colour and music which may have 
suggested the type as well as the titles of many of 



198 INTENTIONS 

their best pictures. For a class that welcomes the 
incompetent with sympathetic eagerness, and that 
confuses the bizarre with the beautiful, and vul- 
garity with truth, they are extremely accomplished. 
They can do etchings that have the brilliancy of 
epigrams, pastels that are as fascinating as para- 
doxes, and as for their portraits, whatever the 
commonplace may say against them, no one can 
deny that they possess that unique and wonderful 
charm which belongs to works of pure fiction. But 
even the Impressionists, earnest and industrious as 
they are, will not do. I like them. Their white 
keynote, with its variations in lilac, was an era in 
colour. Though the moment does not make the 
man, the moment certainly makes the Impression- 
ist, and for the moment in art, and the " moment's 
monument," as Rossetti phrased it, what may not 
be said ? They are suggestive also. If they have 
not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least 
given great encouragement to the short-sighted, and 
while their leaders may have all the inexperience 
of old age, their young men are far too wise to be 
ever sensible. Yet they will insist on treating 
painting as if it were a mode of autobiography 
invented for the use of the illiterate, and are always 
prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of 
their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opin- 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 199 

ions, and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that 
fine contempt of nature v^^hich is the best and only- 
modest thing about them. One tires, at the end, 
of the work of individuals whose individuality is 
always noisy, and generally uninteresting. There 
is far more to be said in favour of that newer school 
at Paris, the ' Archaicistes,' as they call themselves, 
who, refusing to leave the artist entirely at the 
mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art 
in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the 
imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of 
fair colour, and rejecting the tedious realism of 
those who merely paint what they see, try to see 
something worth seeing, and to see it not merely 
with actual and physical vision, but with that no- 
bler vision of the soul which is as far wider in 
spiritual scope as it is far more splendid in artistic 
purpose. They, at any rate, work under those 
decorative conditions that each art requires for its 
perfection, and have sufficient aesthetic instinct to 
regret those sordid and stupid limitations of abso- 
lute modernity of form which have proved the ruin 
of so many of the Impressionists. Still, the art that 
is frankly decorative is the art to live with. It is, of 
all our visible arts, the one art that creates in us 
both mood and temperament. Mere colour, un- 
spoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite 



200 INTENTIONS 

form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different 
ways. The harmony that resides in the dehcate 
proportions of Hues and masses becomes mirrored 
in the mind. The repetitions of pattern give us 
rest. The marvels of design stir the imagination. 
In the mere loveliness of the materials employed 
there are latent elements of culture. Nor is this 
all. By its deHberate rejection of Nature as the 
ideal of beauty, as well as of the imitative method 
of the ordinary painter, decorative art not merely 
prepares the soul for the reception of true imagi- 
native work, but develops in it that sense of form 
which is the basis of creative no less than of critical 
achievement. For the real artist is he who pro- 
ceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to 
thought and passion. He does not first conceive 
an idea, and then say to himself, " I will put my 
idea into a complex metre of fourteen lines," but, 
realizing the beauty of the sonnet-scheme, he con- 
ceives certain modes of music and methods of rhyme, 
and the mere form suggests what is to fill it and 
make it intellectually and emotionally complete. 
From time to time the world cries out against some 
charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed 
and silly phrase, he has " nothing to say." But if 
he had something to say, he would probably say it, 
and the result would be tedious. It is just because 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 20I 

he has no new message, that he can do beautiful work. 
He gains his inspiration from form, and from form 
purely, as an artist should. A real passion would 
ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for 
art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. 
To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is 
to be inartistic. 

Ernest. I wonder do you really believe what you 
say. 

Gilbert. Why should you wonder? It is not 
merely in art that the body is the soul. In every 
sphere of life Form is the beginning of things. 
The rhythmic harmonious gestures of dancing con- 
vey, Plato tells us, both rhythm and harmony into 
the mind. Forms are the food of faith, cried New- 
man in one of those great moments of sincerity 
that made us admire and know the man. He was 
right, though he may not have known how terribly 
right he was. The Creeds are believed, not because 
they are rational, but because they are repeated. 
Yes: Form is everything. It is the secret of life. 
Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become 
dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you 
intensify its ecstasy. Do you wish to love? Use 
Love's Litany, and the words will create the yearn- 
ing from which the world fancies that they spring. 
Have you a grief that corrodes your heart ? Steep 



202 INTENTIONS 

yourself in the language of grief, learn its utterance 
from Prince Hamlet and Queen Constance, and you 
will find that mere expression is a mode of consola- 
tion, and that Form, which is the birth of passion, 
is also the death of pain. And so, to return to the 
sphere of Art, it is Form that creates not merely the 
critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, 
that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things 
under their conditions of beauty. Start with the 
worship of form, and there is no secret in art that 
will not be revealed to you, and remember that in 
criticism, as in creation, temperament is everything, 
and that it is, not by the time of their production, 
but by the temperaments to which they appeal, that 
the schools of art should be historically grouped. 

Ernest. Your theory of education is delightful. 
But what influence will your critic, brought up in 
these exquisite surroundings, possess? Do you 
really think that any artist is ever affected by 
criticism ? 

Gilbert. The influence of the critic will be the 
mere fact of his own existence. He will represent 
the flawless type. In him the culture of the cen- 
tury will see itself realized. You must not ask of 
him to have any aim other than the perfecting of 
himself. The demand of the intellect, as has been 
well said, is simply to feel itself alive. The critic 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 203 

may, indeed, desire to exercise influence ; but, if so, 
he will concern himself not with the individual, but 
with the age, which he will seek to wake into con- 
sciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it 
new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger 
vision and his nobler moods. The actual art of to- 
day will occupy him less than the art of to-morrow, 
far less than the art of yesterday, and as for this or 
that person at present toiling away, what do the in- 
dustrious matter? They do their best, no doubt, 
and consequently we get the worst from them. It 
is always with the best intentions that the worst 
work is done. And besides, my dear Ernest, when 
a man reaches the age of forty, or becomes a Royal 
Academician, or is elected a member of the Athe- 
naeum Club, or is recognized as a popular novelist, 
whose books are in great demand at suburban rail- 
way stations, one may have the amusement of ex- 
posing him, but one cannot have the pleasure of 
reforming him. And this is, I dare say, very 
fortunate for him; for I have no doubt that refor- 
mation is a much more painful process than punish- 
ment — is, indeed, punishment in its most aggra- 
vated and moral form — a fact which accounts for 
our entire failure as a community to reclaim that 
interesting phenomenon who is called the confirmed 
criminal. 



204 INTENTIONS 

Ernest. But may it not be that the poet is the 
best judge of poetry, and the painter of painting? 
Each art must appeal primarily to the artist who 
works in it. His judgment will surely be the most 
valuable ? 

Gilbert. The appeal of all art is simply to the 
artistic temperament. Art does not address herself 
to the specialist. Her claim is that she is universal, 
and that in all her manifestations she is one. In- 
deed, so far from its being true that the artist is the 
best judge of art, a really great artist can never 
judge of other people's work at all, and can hardly, 
in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration 
of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its 
sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation. 
The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to 
his own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the 
dust as a cloud around him. The gods are hidden 
from each other. They can recognize their wor- 
shippers. That is all. 

Ernest. You say that a great artist cannot recog- 
nize the beauty of work different from his own. 

Gilbert. It is impossible for him to do so. Words- 
worth saw in Endymion merely a pretty piece of 
Paganism, and Shelley, with his dislike of actuality, 
was deaf to Wordsworth's message, being repelled 
by its form, and Byron, that great passionate 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 20$ 

human incomplete creature, could appreciate 
neither the poet of the cloud nor the poet of the 
lake, and the wonder of Keats was hidden from 
him. The realism of Euripides was hateful to 
Sophokles. Those droppings of warm tears had no 
music for him. Milton, with his sense of the grand 
style, could not understand the method of Shake- 
speare, any more than could Sir Joshua the method 
of Gainsborough. Bad artists always admire each 
other's worth. They call it being large-minded and 
free from prejudice. But a truly great artist can- 
not conceive of life being shown, or beauty 
fashioned, under any conditions other than those 
that he has selected. Creation employs all its critical 
faculty within its own sphere. It may not use it in 
the sphere that belongs to others. It is exactly be- 
cause a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper 
judge of it. 

Ernest. Do you really mean that? 

Gilbert. Yes, for creation limits, while contempla- 
tion widens, the vision. 

Ernest. But what about technique ? Surely each 
art has its separate technique ? 

Gilbert. Certainly : each art has its grammar and 
its materials. There is no mystery about either, 
and the incompetent can always be correct. But, 
while the laws upon which Art rests may be fixed 



206 INTENTIONS 

and certain to find their true realization, they must 
be touched by the imagination into such beauty 
that they will seem an exception, each one of 
them. Technique is really personality. That is 
the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the 
pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic 
can understand it. To the great poet, there is only 
one method of music — his own. To the great 
painter there is only one manner of painting — that 
which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and 
the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms 
and modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal. 

Ernest. Well, I think I have put all my questions 
to you. And now I must admit — 

Gilbert. Ah ! don't say that you agree with me. 
When people agree with me I always feel that I 
must be wrong. 

Ernest. In that case I certainly won't tell you 
whether I agree with you or not. But I will put 
another question. ^ You have explained to me that 
criticism is a creative art. What future has it? 

Gilbert. It is to criticism that the future belongs. 
The subject-matter at the disposal of creation be- 
comes every day more limited in extent and variety. 
Providence and Mr. Walter Besant have exhausted 
the obvious. If creation is to last at all, it can only 
do so on the condition of becoming far more critical 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 207 

than it is at present. The old roads and dusty 
highways have been traversed too often. Their 
charm has been worn away by plodding feet, and 
they have lost that element of novelty or surprise 
which is so essential for romance. He who would 
stir us now by fiction must either give us an en- 
tirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of 
man in its innermost workings. The first is for the 
moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. 
As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from 
the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a 
palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. 
The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. 
The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in ex- 
quisite incongruity with their surroundings. The 
mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd 
journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the 
point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius 
who drops his aspirates. From the point of view 
of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity 
better than any one has ever known it. Dickens 
knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling 
knows its essence and its seriousness. He is our 
first authority on the second-rate, and has seen 
marvellous things through key-holes, and his back- 
grounds are real works of art. As for the second 
condition, we have had Browning, and Meredith is 



208 INTENTIONS 

with us. But there is still much to be done in the 
sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that 
fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology- 
is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We 
have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is 
all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are 
stored away things more marvellous and more ter- 
rible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the 
author of Le Rouge et le Noir, have sought to track 
the soul into its most secret places, and to make 
life confess its dearest sins. Still, there is a limit 
even to the number of untried backgrounds, and it 
is possible that a further development of the habit 
of introspection may prove fatal to that creative 
faculty to which it seeks to supply fresh material. I 
myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed. 
It springs from too primitive, too natural an im- 
pulse. However this may be, it is certain that the 
subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always 
diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism 
increases daily. There are always new attitudes 
for the mind, and new points of view. The duty of 
imposing form upon chaos does not grow less as the 
world advances. There was never a time when 
Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is 
only by its means that Humanity can become con- 
scious of the point at which it has arrived. 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 209 

Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Crit- 
icism. You might just as well have asked me the 
use of thought. It is Criticism, as Arnold points 
out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the 
age. It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself 
some day, that makes the mind a fine instrument. 
We, in our educational system, have burdened the 
memory with a load of unconnected facts, and 
laboriously striven to impart our laboriously-ac- 
quired knowledge. We teach people how to re- 
member, we never teach them how to grow. It 
has never occurred to us to try and develop in the 
mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and dis- 
cernment. The Greeks did this, and when we come 
in contact with the Greek critical intellect, we can- 
not but be conscious that, while our subject-matter 
is in every respect larger and more varied than theirs, 
theirs is the only method by which this subject-mat- 
ter can be interpreted. England has done one thing ; 
it has invented and established Public Opinion, which 
is an attempt to organize the ignorance of the com- 
munity, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical 
force. But Wisdom has always been hidden from 
it. Considered as an instrument of thought, the Eng- 
lish mind is coarse and undeveloped. The only 
thing that can purify it is the growth of the critical 
instinct. 



2IO INTENTIONS 

It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes 
culture possible. It takes the cumbersome mass of 
creative work, and distils it into a finer essence. 
Who that desires to retain any sense of form could 
struggle through the monstrous multitudinous books 
that the world has produced, books in which thought 
stammers or ignorance brawls ? The thread that is 
to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the 
hands of Criticism. Nay more, where there is no 
record, and history is either lost or was never written. 
Criticism can recreate the past for us from the very 
smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as 
the man of science can from some tiny bone, or the 
mere impress of a foot upon a rock, recreate for us 
the winged dragon or Titan lizard that once made 
the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth 
out of his cave, and make Leviathan swim once 
more across the startled sea. Prehistoric history be- 
longs to the philological and archaeological critic. It 
is to him that the origins of things are revealed. The 
self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly always 
misleading. Through philological criticism alone we 
know more of the centuries of which no actual record 
has been preserved, than we do of the centuries that 
have left us their scrolls. It can do for us what can 
be done neither by physics nor metaphysics. It 
can give us the exact science of mind in the process 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 211 

of becoming. It can do for us what History can- 
not do. It can tell us what man thought before he 
learned how to write. You have asked me about 
the influence of Criticism. I think I have answered 
that question already ; but there is this also to be 
said. It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan. 
The Manchester school tried to make men realize 
the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the 
commercial advantages of peace. It sought to de- 
grade the wonderful world into a common market- 
place for the buyer and the seller. It addressed itself 
to the lowest instincts, and it failed. War followed 
upon war, and the tradesman's creed did not pre- 
vent France and Germany from clashing together in 
blood-stained battle. There are others of our own 
day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympa- 
thies, or to the shallow dogmas of some vague system 
of abstract ethics. They have their Peace Societies, 
so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for 
unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among 
those who have never read history. But mere emo- 
tional sympathy will not do. It is too variable, and 
too closely connected with the passions ; and a board 
of arbitrators who, for the general welfare of the race, 
are to be deprived of the power of putting their de- 
cisions into execution, will not be of much avail. 
There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and 



212 INTENTIONS 

that is Justice without her sword in her hand. When 
Right is not Might, it is Evil. 

No : the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, 
any more than the greed for gain could do so. It is 
only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual 
criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race 
prejudices. Goethe — you will not misunderstand 
what I say — was a German of the Germans. He 
loved his country — no man more so. Its people were 
dear to him ; and he led them. Yet, when the iron 
hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and corn- 
field, his lips were silent. " How can one write songs 
of hatred without hating?" he said to Eckermann, 
" and how could I, to whom culture and barbarism 
are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among 
the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I owe 
so great a part of my own cultivation ? " This note, 
sounded in the modern world by Goethe first, will be- 
come, I think, the starting point for the cosmopoli- 
tanism of the future. Criticism will annihilate race 
prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human 
mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted 
to make war upon another nation, we shall remem- 
ber that we are seeking to destroy an element of our 
own culture, and possibly its most important ele- 
■ ment. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will 
always have its fascination. When it is looked upon 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 21 3 

as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. The change 
will, of course, be slow, and people will not be con- 
scious of it. They will not say " We will not war 
against France because her prose is perfect," but be- 
cause the prose of France is perfect they will not 
hate the land. Intellectual criticism will bind Eu- 
rope together in bonds far closer than those that can 
be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will 
give us the peace that springs from understanding. 
Nor is this all. It is Criticism that, recognizing 
no position as final, and refusing to bind itself by 
the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school, creates 
that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for 
its own sake, and loves it not the less because it 
knows it to be unattainable. How little we have of 
this temper in England, and how much we need it! 
The English mind is always in a rage. The intel- 
lect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid 
quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate the- 
ologians. It was reserved for a man of science to 
show us the supreme example of that " sweet rea- 
sonableness " of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, 
alas! to so little effect. The author of the Origin 
of Species had, at any rate, the philosophic temper. 
If one contemplates the ordinary pulpits and plat- 
forms of England, one can but feel the contempt of 
Julian, or the indifference of Montaigne. We are 



2 14 INTENTIONS 

dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sin- 
cerity. Anything approaching to the free play of 
the mind is practically unknown amongst us. Peo- 
ple cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, 
but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin 
except stupidity. 

Ernest. Ah ! what an antinomian you are ! 

Gilbert. The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an 
antinomian always. To be good, according to the 
vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite 
easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid 
terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a 
certain low passion for middle-class respectability. 
.Esthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to 
a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a 
thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. 
Even a colour-sense is more important, in the de- 
velopment of the individual, than a sense of right 
and wrong. -Esthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the 
sphere of conscious civilization, what, in the sphere 
of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. 
Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possi- 
ble. Esthetics, like sexual selection, make life 
lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and 
give it progress, and variety and change. And when 
we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain 
to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 215 

the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, 
not because they make the renunciations of the 
ascetic, but because they can do everything they 
wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for 
nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being 
an entity so divine that it is able to transform into 
elements of a richer experience, or a finer suscepti- 
bility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions 
that with the common would be commonplace, 
or with the uneducated, ignoble, or with the 
shameful vile. Is this dangerous? Yes; it is 
dangerous — all ideas, as I told you, are so. But 
the night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp. 
One more thing I cannot help saying to you. You 
have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile 
thing. The nineteenth century is a turning point 
in history simply on account of the work of two men, 
Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book 
of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. 
Not to recognize this is to miss the meaning of one 
of the most important eras in the progress of the 
world. Creation is always behind the age. It is 
Criticism that leads us. The Critical Spirit and the 
World-Spirit are one. 

Ernest. And he who is in possession of this spirit, 
or whom this spirit possesses, will, I suppose, do 
nothing ? 



2l6 INTENTIONS 

Gilbert. Like the Persephone of whom Landor 
tells us, the sweet pensive Persephone around whose 
white feet the asphodel and amaranth are blooming, 
he will sit contented " in that deep, motionless quiet 
which mortals pity, and which the gods enjoy." He 
will look out upon the world and know its secret. 
By contact with divine things, he will become divine. 
His will be the perfect life, and his only. 

Ernest. You have told me many strange things 
to-night, Gilbert. You have told me that it is more 
difficult to talk about a thing than to do it, and that 
to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the 
world; you have told me that all Art is immoral, 
and all thought dangerous ; that criticism is more 
creative than creation, and that the highest criticism 
is that which reveals in the work of Art what the 
artist had not put there ; that it is exactly because a 
man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge 
of it ; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and 
not rational. My friend, you are a dreamer. 

Gilbert. Yes ; I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is 
one who can only find his way by moonlight, and 
his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the 
rest of the world. 

Ernest. His punishment? 

Gilbert. And his reward. But see, it is dawn 
already. Draw back the curtains and ppen the 



THE CRITIC AS ARTIST 217 

windows wide. How cool the morning air is ! Picca- 
dilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A 
faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the 
shadows of the white houses are purple. It is too 
late to sleep. Let us go down to Covent Garden 
and look at the roses. Come! I am tired of 
thought. 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 

A NOTE ON ILLUSION 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 



In many of the somewhat violent attacks that have 
recently been made on that splendour of mounting 
which now characterizes our Shakespearian revivals 
in England, it seems to have been tacitly assumed 
by the critics that Shakespeare himself was more or 
less indifferent to the costume of his actors, and 
that, could he see Mrs. Langtry's production of 
Antony and Cleopatra, he would probably say that 
the play, and the play only, is the thing, and that 
everything else is leather and prunella. While, as 
regards any historical accuracy in dress, Lord 
Lytton, in an article in the Nineteenth Century, has 
laid it down as a dogma of art that archaeology is 
entirely out of place in the presentation of any of 
Shakespeare's plays, and the attempt to introduce it 
one of the stupidest pedantries of an age of prigs. 

Lord Lytton's position I shall examine later on ; 
but, as regards the theory that Shakespeare did not 



222 INTENTIONS 

busy himself much about the costume-wardrobe of 
his theatre, anybody who cares to study Shake- 
speare's method will see that there is absolutely no 
dramatist of the French, English, or Athenian stage 
who relies so much for his illusionist effects on the 
dress of his actors as Shakespeare does himself. 

Knowing how the artistic temperament is always 
fascinated by beauty of costume, he constantly in- 
troduces into his plays masques and dances, purely 
for the sake of the pleasure which they give the 
eye ; and we have still his stage directions for the 
three great processions in Henry the Eighth, direc- 
tions which are characterized by the most extraor- 
dinary elaborateness of detail down to the collars 
of S.S. and the pearls in Anne Boleyn's hair. In- 
deed, it would be quite easy for a modern manager 
to reproduce these pageants absolutely as Shake- 
speare had them designed ; and so accurate were 
they that one of the Court officials of the time, 
writing an account of the last performance of the 
play at the Globe Theatre to a friend, actually com- 
plains of their realistic character, notably of the 
production on the stage of the Knights of the Gar- 
ter in the robes and insignia of the order, as being 
calculated to bring ridicule on the real ceremonies ; 
much in the same spirit in which the French 
Government, some time ago, prohibited that de- 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 223 

lightful actor, M. Christian, from appearing in uni- 
form, on the plea that it was prejudicial to the glory 
of the army that a colonel should be caricatured. 
And elsewhere the gorgeousness of apparel which 
distinguished the English stage under Shakespeare's 
influence was attacked by the contemporary critics, 
not as a rule, however, on the grounds of the demo- 
cratic tendencies of realism, but usually on those 
moral grounds which are always the last refuge of 
people who have no sense of beauty. 

The point, however, which I wish to emphasize 
is, not that Shakespeare appreciated the value of 
lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to 
poetry, but that he saw how important costume is 
as a means of producing certain dramatic effects. 
Many of his plays, such as Measure for Measure, 
Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
Airs Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline, and others, 
depend for their illusion on the character of the 
various dresses worn by the hero or the heroine ; 
the delightful scene in Henry the Sixth, on the 
modern miracles of healing by faith, loses all its 
point unless Gloster is in black and scarlet ; and the 
denouinent of the Merry Wives of Windsor hinges 
on the colour of Anne Page's gown. As for the 
uses Shakespeare makes of disguises, the instances 
are almost numberless. Posthumus hides his pas- 



224 INTENTIONS 

sion under a peasant's garb, and Edgar his pride 
beneath an idiot's rags ; Portia wears the apparel of 
a lawyer, and Rosalind is attired in all points as a 
man; the cloak-bag of Pisanio changes Imogen 
to the youth Fidele ; Jessica flees from her father's 
house in boy's dress, and Julia ties up her yellow 
hair in fantastic love-knots, and dons hose and 
doublet; Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a 
shepherd, and Romeo his as a pilgrim ; Prince Hal 
and Poins appear first as footpads in buckram suits, 
and then in white aprons and leather jerkins as the 
waiters in a tavern ; and as for Falstaff, does he not 
come on as a highwayman, as an old woman, as 
Heme the Hunter, and as the clothes going to the 
laundry ? 

Nor are the examples of the employment of cos- 
tume as a mode of intensifying dramatic situation 
less numerous. After the slaughter of Duncan, Mac- 
beth appears in his night-gown as if aroused from 
sleep; Timon ends in rags the play he had begun 
in splendour; Richard flatters the London citizens 
in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon 
as he has stepped in blood to the throne, marches 
through the streets in crown and George and Gar- 
ter; the climax of the Tempest is reached when 
Prospero, throwing off his enchanter's robes, sends 
Ariel for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself as 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 225 

the great Italian Duke ; the very Ghost in Hamlet 
changes his mystical apparel to produce different 
effects; and as for Juliet, a modern playwright 
would probably have laid her out in her shroud, 
and made the scene a scene of horror merely, but 
Shakespeare arrays her in rich and gorgeous rai- 
ment, whose loveliness makes the vault " a feasting 
presence full of light," turns the tomb into a bridal 
chamber, and gives the cue and motive for Romeo's 
speech on the triumph of Beauty over Death. 

Even small details of dress, such as the colour of 
a major-domo's stockings, the pattern on a wife's 
handkerchief, the sleeve of a young soldier, and a 
fashionable woman's bonnets, become in Shake- 
speare's hands points of actual dramatic importance, 
and by some of them the action of the play in ques- 
tion is conditioned absolutely. Many other drama- 
tists have availed themselves of costume as a method 
of expressing directly to the audience the character 
of a person on his entrance, though hardly so bril- 
liantly as Shakespeare has done in the case of the 
dandy Parolles, whose dress, by the way, only an 
archaeologist can understand ; the fun of a master 
and servants exchanging coats in presence of the 
audience, of shipwrecked sailors squabbling over 
the division of a lot of fine clothes, and of a tinker 
dressed up like a duke while he is in his cups, may 



226 INTENTIONS 

be regarded as part of that great career which 
costume has always played in comedy from the 
time of Aristophanes down to Mr, Gilbert; but 
nobody from the mere details of apparel and 
adornment has ever drawn such irony of contrast, 
such immediate and tragic effect, such pity and 
such pathos, as Shakespeare himself. Armed cap- 
a-pie, the dead king stalks on the battlements of 
Elsinore because all is not right with Denmark; 
Shylock's Jewish gaberdine is part of the stigma 
under which that wounded and embittered nature 
writhes; Arthur begging for his life can think of 
no better plea than the handkerchief he had given 
Hubert- 
Have you the heart ? when your head did but ache, 
I knit my handkerchief about your brows, 
(The best I had, a princess wrought it me) 
And I did never ask it you again. 

and Orlando's blood-stained napkin strikes the first 
sombre note in that exquisite woodland idyll, and 
shows us the depth of feeling that underlies Rosa- 
lind's fanciful wit and wilful jesting. 

Last night 'twas on my arm ; I kissed it; 
I hope it be not gone to tell my lord 
That I kiss aught but he. 

says Imogen, jesting on the loss of the bracelet 
which was already on its way to Rome to rob her 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 227 

of her husband's faith ; the little Prince passing to 
the Tower plays with the dagger in his uncle's 
girdle ; Duncan sends a ring to Lady Macbeth on 
the night of his own murder, and the ring of Portia 
turns the tragedy of the merchant into a wife's 
comedy. The great rebel York dies with a paper 
crown on his head ; Hamlet's black suit is a kind of 
colour-motive in the piece, like the mourning of 
Chimene in the Cid ; and the climax of Antony's 
speech is the production of Caesar's cloak : — 

I remember 
The first time ever Cassar put it on. 
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent. 
The day he overcame the Nervii : — 
Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through : 
See what a rent the envious Casca made : 
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. . . . 
Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold 
Our Ccesar's vesture wounded? 

The flowers which Ophelia carries with her in 
her madness are as pathetic as the violets that 
blossom on a grave ; the eff"ect of Lear's wandering 
on the heath is intensified beyond words by his 
fantastic attire; and when Cloten, stung by the 
taunt of that simile which his sister draws from her 
husband's raiment, arrays himself in that husband's 
very garb to work upon her the deed of shame, we 
feel that there is nothing in the whole of modern 



228 INTENTIONS 

French realism, nothing even in Therese Raquin, 
that masterpiece of horror, which for terrible and 
tragic significance can compare with this strange 
scene in Cymbeline. 

In the actual dialogue also some of the most 
vivid passages are those suggested by costume. 
Rosalind's 

Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I 
have a doublet and hose in my disposition ? 

Constance's 

Grief fills the place up of my absent child, 
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form ; 

and the quick sharp cry of Elizabeth — 

Ah ! cut my lace asunder ! 

are only a few of the many examples one might 
quote. One of the finest effects I have ever seen 
on the stage was Salvini, in the last act of Lear, 
tearing the plume from Kent's cap and applying it 
to Cordelia's lips when he came to the line. 

This feather stirs ; she lives ! 

Mr. Booth, whose Lear had many noble qualities 
of passion, plucked, I remember, some fur from his 
archaeologically-incorrect ermine for the same busi- 
ness ; but Salvini's was the finer effect of the two, 
as well as the truer. And those who saw Mr. 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 229 

Irving in the last act of Richard the Third have 

not, I am sure, forgotten how much the agony and 

terror of his dream was intensified, by contrast, 

through the calm and quiet that preceded it, and the 

delivery of such lines as 

What, is my beaver easier than it was ? 

And all my armour laid into my tent? 

Look that my staves be sound and not too heavy — 

lines which had a double meaning for the audience 
remembering the last words which Richard's mother 
called after him as he was marching to Bosworth : — 

Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse, 
Which in the day of battle tire thee more 
Than all the complete armour that thou wear'st. 

As regards the resources which Shakespeare had 
at his disposal, it is to be remarked that, while he 
more than once complains of the smallness of the 
stage on which he has to produce big historical plays, 
and of the want of scenery which obliges him to cut 
out many effective open-air incidents, he always 
writes as a dramatist who had at his disposal a most 
elaborate theatrical wardrobe, and who could rely on 
the actors taking pains about their make-up. Even 
now it is difficult to produce such a play as the Cofn- 
edy of Errors ; and to the picturesque accident of 
Miss Ellen Terry's brother resembling herself we 
owed the opportunity of seeing Twelfth Night 



230 INTENTIONS 

adequately performed. Indeed, to put any play of 
Shakespeare's on the stage, absolutely as he himself 
wished it to be done, requires the services of a good 
property-man, a clever wig-maker, a costumier with 
a sense of colour and a knowledge of textures, a 
master of the methods of making-up, a fencing-mas- 
ter, a dancing- master, and an artist to personally 
direct the whole production. For he is most careful 
to tell us the dress and appearance of each charac- 
ter. " Racine abhorre la realite," says Auguste 
Vacquerie somewhere ; " il ne daigne pas s'occuper 
de son costume. Si Ton s'en rapportait aux indica- 
tions du poete, Agamemnon serait vetu d'un sceptre 
et Achille d'une epee." But with Shakespeare it is 
very different. He gives us directions about the cos- 
tumes of Perdita, Florizel, Autolycus, the witches in 
Macbeth^ and the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, 
several elaborate descriptions of his fat knight, and 
a detailed account of the extraordinary garb in which 
Petruchio is to be married. Rosalind, he tells us, is 
tall, and is to carry a spear and a little dagger ; Celia 
is smaller, and is to paint her face brown so as to look 
sunburnt. The children who play at fairies in Wind- 
sor Forest are to be dressed in white and green — a 
compliment, by the way, to Queen Elizabeth, whose 
favourite colours they were — and in white, with green 
garlands and green vizors, the angels are to come to 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 23 I 

Katherine in Kimbolton. Bottom is in homespun, 
Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his wear- 
ing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his 
boots. The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white 
sheet with her husband in mourning beside her. The 
motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the Cardinal, and 
the French lilies broidered on the English coats, 
are all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue. 
We know the patterns on the Dauphin's armour and 
the Pucelle's sword, the crest on Warwick's helmet 
and the colour of Bardolph's nose. Portia has golden 
hair, Phoebe is black-haired, Orlando has chestnut 
curls, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek's hair hangs like 
flax on a distaff, and won't curl at all. Some of the 
characters are stout, some lean, some straight, some 
hunchbacked, some fair, some dark, and some are to 
blacken their faces. Lear has a white beard, Ham- 
let's father a grizzled, and Benedict is to shave his 
in the course of the play. Indeed, on the subject of 
stage beards Shakespeare is quite elaborate ; tells 
us of the many different colours in use, and gives a 
hint to actors to always see that their own are prop- 
erly tied on. There is a dance of reapers in rye- 
straw hats, and of rustics in hairy coats like satyrs ; 
a masque of Amazons, a masque of Russians, and a 
classical masque; several immortal scenes over a 
weaver in an ass's head, a riot over the colour of a 



232 INTENTIONS 

coat which it takes the Lord Mayor of London to 
quell, and a scene between an infuriated husband 
and his wife's milliner about the slashing of a 
sleeve. 

As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from 
dress, and the aphorisms he makes on it, his hits at 
the costume of his age, particularly at the ridicu- 
lous size of the ladies' bonnets, and the many de- 
scriptions of the ' mundus muliebris,' from the song 
of Autolycus in the Winter's Tale down to the ac- 
count of the Duchess of Milan's gown in Much Ado 
About Nothing, they are far too nurtierous to quote ; 
though it may be worth while to remind people 
that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be 
found in Lear's scene with Edgar — a passage which 
has the advantage of brevity and stjde over the 
grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing meta- 
physics of Sartor Resartus. But I think that from 
what I have already said it is quite clear that 
Shakespeare was very much interested in costume. 
I do not mean in that shallow sense by which it has 
been concluded from his knowledge of deeds and 
daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of 
the Elizabethan age ; but that he saw that costume 
could be made at once impressive of a certain effect 
on the audience and expressive of certain types of 
character and is one of the essential factors of the 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 233 

means which a true illusionist has at his disposal. 
Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard was 
of as much value as Juliet's loveliness; he sets the 
serge of the radical beside the silks of the lord, and 
sees the stage effects to be got from each ; he has 
as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in 
rags as he has in cloth of gold, and recognizes the 
artistic beauty of ugliness. 

The difficulty Ducis felt about translating Othello 
in consequence of the importance given to such a 
vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his attempt to 
soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate 
" Le bandeau ! le bandeau ! " may be taken as an 
example of the difference between ' la tragedie 
philosophique ' and the drama of real life ; and 
the introduction for the first time of the word 
' mouchoir ' at the Theatre Franfais was an era in 
that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is 
the father and M. Zola the ' enfant terrible,' just 
as the classicism of the earlier part of the century 
was emphasized by Talma's refusal to play Greek 
heroes any longer in a powdered periwig — one of 
the many instances, by the way, of that desire for 
archaeological accuracy in dress which has distin- 
guished the great actors of our age. 

In criticising the importance given to money in 
La Comedie Humaine, Theophile Gautier says that 



234 INTENTIONS 

Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero in 
fiction, 'leheros metalHque.' Of Shakespeare it 
may be said that he was the first to see the dramatic 
value of doublets, and that a climax may depend on 
a crinoline. 

The burning of the Globe Theatre — an event due, 
by the way, to the results of the passion for illusion 
that distinguished Shakespeare's stage-management 
— has unfortunately robbed us of many important 
documents ; but in the inventory, still in existence, 
of the costume-wardrobe of a London theatre in 
Shakespeare's time, there are mentioned particular 
costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, 
friars and fools ; green coats for Robin Hood's men, 
and a green gown for Maid Marian ; a white and 
gold doublet for Henry the Fifth, and a robe for 
Longshanks ; besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, 
gowns of cloth of gold and of cloth of silver, taffeta 
gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats, frieze 
coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, 
red suits, grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe 
" for to goo invisibell," which seems inexpensive at 
3/. los., and four incomparable fardingales — all of 
which show a desire to give every character an 
appropriate dress. There are also entries of Spanish, 
Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets, lances, 
painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 235 

as well as of costumes for Turkish Janissaries, 
Roman Senators, and all the gods and goddesses of 
Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archsolog- 
ical research on the part of the manager of the 
theatre. It is true that there is a mention of a 
bodice for Eve, but probably the ' donnee ' of the 
play was after the Fall. 

Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age 
of Shakespeare will see that archaeology was one of 
its special characteristics. After that revival of the 
classical forms of architecture which was one of the 
notes of the Renaissance, and the printing at Venice 
and elsewhere of the masterpieces of Greek and Latin 
literature, had come naturally an interest in the orna- 
mentation and costume of the antique world. Nor 
was it for the learning that they could acquire, but 
rather for the loveliness that they might create, that 
the artists studied these things. The curious objects 
that were being constantly brought to light by ex- 
cavations were not left to moulder in a museum, for 
the contemplation of a callous curator, and the * en- 
nui ' of a policeman bored by the absence of crime. 
They were used as motives for the production of a 
new art, which was to be not beautiful merely, but 
also strange. 

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen dig- 
ging on the Appian Way came across an old Roman 



236 INTENTIONS 

sarcophagus inscribed with the name " Julia, daugh- 
ter of Claudius." On opening the coffer they found 
within its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl 
of about fifteen years of age, preserved by the em- 
balmer's skill from corruption and the decay of time. 
Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her 
in crisp curling gold, and from her lips and cheek 
the bloom of maidenhood had not yet departed. 
Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the 
centre of a new cult, and from all parts of the city 
crowded pilgrims to worship at the wonderful shrine 
till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the 
secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what 
secrets Judaea's rough and rock-hewn sepulchre con- 
tained, had the body conveyed away by night, and in 
secret buried. Legend though it may be, yet the 
story is none the less valuable as showing us the atti- 
tude of the Renaissance towards the antique world. 
Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the 
antiquarian; it was a means by which they could 
touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath 
and beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of 
romanticism forms that else had been old and out- 
worn. From the pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to 
Mantegna's " Triumph of Caesar," and the service 
Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of 
this spirit can be traced ; nor was it confined merely 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 237 

to the immobile arts — the arts of arrested movement 
— but its influence was to be seen also in the great 
Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant 
amusement of the gay courts of the time, and in 
the public pomps and processions with which the 
citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet 
the princes that chanced to visit them ; pageants, by 
the way, which were considered so important that 
large prints were made of them and pubHshed — a 
fact which is a proof of the general interest at the 
time in matters of such kind. 

And this use of archaeology in shows, so far from 
being a bit of priggish pedantry, is in every way legit- 
imate and beautiful. For the stage is not merely the 
meeting place of all the arts, but it is also the return 
of art to life. Sometimes in an archaeological novel 
the use of strange and obsolete terms seems to hide 
the reality beneath the learning, and I dare say that 
r^^ny of the readers of Notre Dame de Paris have 
been much puzzled over the meaning of such expres- 
sions as 'la casaque L mahoitres,' ' les voulgiers,' ' le 
gallimard tache d'encre,' ' les craaquiniers,' and the 
like ; but with the stage how different it is ! The an- 
cient world wakes from its sleep, and history moves as 
a pageant before our eyes, without obliging us to have 
recourse to a dictionary or an encyclopedia for the 
perfection of our enjoyment. Indeed, there is not 



238 INTENTIONS 

the slightest necessity that the pubHc should know 
the authorities for the mounting of any piece. From 
such materials, for instance, as the disk of Theodo- 
sius, materials with which the majority of people are 
probably not very familiar, Mr. E. W. Godwin, one of 
the most artistic spirits of this century in England, 
created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of 
Claudian, and showed us the life of Byzantium in 
the fourth century, not by a dreary lecture and a set 
of grimy casts, not by a novel which requires a glos- 
sary to explain it, but by the visible presentation 
before us of all the glory of that great town. And 
while the costumes were true to the smallest points of 
colour and design, yet the details were not assigned 
that abnormal importance which they must neces- 
sarily be given in a piecemeal lecture, but were sub- 
ordinated to the rules of lofty composition and the 
unity of artistic effect. Mr. Symonds, speaking of 
that great picture of Mantegna's, now in Hampton 
Court, says that the artist has converted an antiqua- 
rian motive into a theme for melodies of line. The 
same could have been said with equal justice of Mr. 
Godwin's scene. Only the foolish called it pedantry, 
only those who would neither look nor listen spoke 
of the passion of the play being killed by its paint. 
It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its 
picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, get- 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 239 

ting rid of any necessity for tedious descriptions, and 
showing us, by the colour and character of Claudi- 
an's dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole 
nature and life of the man, from what school of 
philosophy he affected, down to what horses he 
backed on the turf. 

And indeed archaeology is only really delightful 
when transfused into some form of art. I have no 
desire to underrate the services of laborious scholars, 
but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's 
Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor 
Max Miiller's treatment of the same mythology as 
a disease of language. Better Endymion than any 
theory, however sound, or, as in the present instance, 
unsound, of an epidemic amongst adjectives ! And 
who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi's 
book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion 
for his Ode on a Grecian Urn ? Art, and art only, 
can make archaeology beautiful ; and the theatric art 
can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can 
combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of 
actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But 
the sixteenth century was not merely the age of 
Vitruvius ; it was the age of Vecellio also. Every 
nation seems suddenly to have become interested in 
the dress of its neighbours. Europe began to inves- 
tigate its own clothes, and the amount of books 



240 INTENTIONS 

published on national costumes is quite extraordi- 
nary. At the beginning of the century the Nurem- 
berg Chronicle^ with its two thousand illustrations, 
reached its fifth edition, and before the century was 
over seventeen editions were published of Munster's 
Cosmography. Besides these two books there were 
also the works of Michael Colyns, of Hans Weigel, 
of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well 
illustrated, some of the drawings in VeceUio being 
probably from the hand of Titian. 

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that 
they acquired their knowledge. The development 
of the habit of foreign travel, the increased com- 
mercial intercourse between countries, and the fre- 
quency of diplom.atic missions, gave every nation 
many opportunities of studying the various forms 
of contemporary dress. After the departure from 
England, for instance, of the ambassadors from the 
Czar the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco, Henry 
the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in 
the strange attire of their visitors. Later on Lon- 
don saw, perhaps too often, the sombre splendour 
of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came envoys 
from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, 
had an important influence on English costume. 

And the interest was not confined merely to 
classical dress, or the dress of foreign nations ; 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 24I 

there was also a good deal of research, amongst 
theatrical people especially, into the ancient cos- 
tume of England itself: and when Shakespeare, 
in the prologue to one of his plays, expresses his 
regret at being unable to produce helmets of the 
period, he is speaking as an Elizabethan manager 
and not merely as an Elizabethan poet. At Cam- 
bridge, for instance, during his day, a play of 
Richard the Third was performed, in which the 
actors were attired in real dresses of the time, pro- 
cured from the great collection of historical cos- 
tume in the Tower, which was always open to the 
inspection of managers, and sometimes placed at 
their disposal. And I cannot help thinking that 
this performance must have been far more artistic, 
as regards costume, than Garrick's mounting of 
Shakespeare's own play on the subject, in which he 
himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress, and 
everybody else in the costume of the time of 
George the Third, Richmond especially being much 
admired in the uniform of a young guardsman. 

For what is the use to the stage of that archaeology 
which has so strangely terrified the critics, but that 
it, and it alone, can give us the architecture and 
apparel suitable to the time in which the action of 
the play passes ? It enables us to see a Greek dressed 
like a Greek, and an Italian Hke an Italian ; to enjoy 



242 INTENTIONS 

the arcades of Venice and the balconies of Verona; 
and, if the play deals with any of the great eras in 
our country's history, to contemplate the age in its 
proper attire, and the king in his habit as he lived. 
And I wonder, by the way, what Lord Lytton 
would have said some time ago, at the Princess's 
Theatre, had the curtain risen on his father's Brutus 
reclining in a Queen Anne chair, attired in a flowing 
wig and a flowered dressing-gown, a costume which 
in the last century was considered peculiarly appro- 
priate to an antique Roman ! For in those halcyon 
days of the drama no archaeology troubled the stage, 
or distressed the critics, and our inartistic grandfathers 
sat peaceably in a stifling atmosphere of anachro- 
nisms, and beheld with the calm complacency of the 
age of prose an lachimo in powder and patches, a 
Lear in lace ruffles, and a Lady Macbeth in a large 
crinoline. I can understand archaeology being at- 
tacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but 
to attack it as pedantic seems to be very much be- 
side the mark. However, to attack it for any reason 
is foolish ; one might just as well speak disrespect- 
fully of the equator. For archaeology, being a sci- 
ence, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply. 
Its value depends entirely on how it is used, and 
only an artist can use it. We look to the archaeol- 
ogist for the materials, to the artist for the method. 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 243 

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of 
Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to 
settle is the best date for the drama. This should be 
determined by the general spirit of the play, more 
than by any actual historical references which may 
occur in it. Most Hamlets I have seen were placed . 
far too early. Hamlet is essentially a scholar of the 
Revival of Learning; and if the allusion to the re- 
cent invasion of England by the Danes puts it back 
to the ninth century, the use of foils brings it down 
much later. Once, however, that the date has been 
fixed, then the archaeologist is to supply us with the 
facts which the artist is to convert into effects. 

It has been said that the anachronisms in the 
plays themselves show us that Shakespeare was in- 
different to historical accuracy, and a great deal of 
capital has been made out of Hector's indiscreet 
quotation from Aristotle. Upon the other hand, the 
anachronisms are really few in number, and not very 
important, and, had Shakespeare's attention been 
drawn to them by a brother artist, he would prob- 
ably have corrected them. For, though they can 
hardly be called blemishes, they are certainly not the 
great beauties of his work ; or, at least, if they are, 
their anachronistic charm cannot be emphasized un- 
less the play is accurately mounted according to its 
proper date. In looking at Shakespeare's plays as 



244 INTENTIONS 

a whole, however, what is really remarkable is their 
extraordinary fidelity as regards his personages and 
his plots. Many of his ' dramatis personae ' are 
people who had actually existed, and some of them 
might have been seen in real life by a portion of his 
audience. Indeed the most violent attack that was 
made on Shakespeare in his time was for his sup- 
posed caricature of Lord Cobham. As for his plots, 
Shakespeare constantly draws them either from au- 
thentic history, or from the old ballads and tradi- 
tions which served as history to the Elizabethan 
public, and which even now no scientific historian 
would dismiss as absolutely untrue. And not merely 
did he select fact instead of fancy as the basis of 
much of his imaginative work, but he always gives 
to each play the general character, the social atmo- 
sphere in a word, of the age in question. Stupidity 
he recognizes as being one of the permanent charac- 
teristics of all European civilizations ; so he sees no 
difference between a London mob of his own day 
and a Roman mob of Pagan days, between a silly 
watchman in Messina and a silly Justice of the Peace 
in Windsor. But when he deals with higher charac- 
ters, with those exceptions of each age which are so 
fine that they become its types, he gives them abso- 
lutely the stamp and seal of their time. Virgilia is 
'one of those Roman wives on whose tomb was 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 245 

written " Domi mansit, lanam fecit," as surely as 
Juliet is the romantic girl of the Renaissance. He 
is even true to the characteristics of race. Hamlet 
has all the imagination and irresolution of the 
Northern nations, and the Princess Katharine is as 
entirely French as the heroine of Divoi^fons. Harry 
the Fifth is a pure Englishman, and Othello a true 
Moor. 

Again when Shakespeare treats of the history of 
England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth cen- 
turies, it is wonderful how careful he is to have his 
facts perfectly right — indeed he follows Holinshed 
with curious fidelity. The incessant wars between 
France and England are described with extraor- 
dinary accuracy down to the names of the be- 
sieged towns, the ports of landing and embarkation, 
the sites and dates of the battles, the titles of the 
commanders on each side, and the lists of the killed 
and wounded. And as regards the Civil Wars of 
the Roses we have many elaborate genealogies of 
the seven sons of Edward the Third ; the claims of 
the rival Houses of York and Lancaster to the 
throne are discussed at length ; and if the English 
aristocracy will not read Shakespeare as a poet, 
they should certainly read him as a sort of early 
Peerage. There is hardly a single title in the 
Upper House, with the exception of course of the 



246 INTENTIONS 

uninteresting titles assumed by the law lords, which 
does not appear in Shakespeare along with many- 
details of family history, creditable and discreditable. 
Indeed if it be really necessary that the School 
Board children should know all about the Wars of 
the Roses, they could learn their lessons just as 
well out of Shakespeare as out of shilling primers, 
and learn them, I need not say, far more pleasur- 
ably. Even in Shakespeare's own day this use of 
his plays was recognized. " The historical plays 
teach history to those who cannot read it in the 
chronicles," says Heywood in a tract about the 
stage, and yet I am sure that sixteenth-century 
chronicles were much more delightful reading than 
nineteenth-century primers are. 

Of course the sesthetic value of Shakespeare's 
plays does not, in the slightest degree, depend on 
their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is inde- 
pendent of facts always, inventing or selecting them 
at pleasure. But still Shakespeare's use of facts is 
a most interesting part of his method of work, and 
shows us his attitude towards the stage, and his re- 
lations to the great art of illusion. Indeed he 
would have been very much surprised at anyone 
classing his plays with " fairy tales," as Lord 
Lytton does ; for one of his aims was to create for 
England a national historical drama, which should 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 247 

deal with incidents with which the pubHc was well 
acquainted, and with heroes that Hved in the 
memory of a people. Patriotism, I need hardly 
say, is not a necessary quahty of art ; but it means, 
for the artist the substitution of a universal for an 
individual feeling, and for the public the presenta- 
tion of a work of art in a most attractive and popu- 
lar form. It is worth noticing that Shakespeare's 
first and last successes were both historical plays. 

It may be asked what has this to do with Shake- 
speare's attitude towards costume. I answer that a 
dramatist who laid such stress on historical accuracy 
of fact would have welcomed historical accuracy of 
costume as a most important adjunct to his illusion- 
ist method. And I have no hesitation in saying 
that he did so. The reference to helmets of the 
period in the prologue to He7iry the FiftJi may be 
considered fanciful, though Shakespeare must have 

often seen 

The very casque 

That did affright the air at Agincourt, 

where it still hangs in the dusky gloom of West- 
minster Abbey, along with the saddle of that " imp 
of fame," and the dinted shield with its torn blue 
velvet lining and its tarnished lilies of gold ; but the 
use of military tabards in Henry the Sixth is a bit 
of pure archaeology, as they were not worn in the 



248 INTENTIONS 

sixteenth century ; and the King's own tabard, I 
may mention, was still suspended over his tomb in 
St. George's Chapel, Windsor, in Shakespeare's 
day. For, up to the time of the unfortunate 
triumph of the Philistines in 1645, the chapels and 
cathedrals of England were the great national 
museums of archaeology, and in them was kept the 
armour and attire of the heroes of English history. 
A good deal was of course preserved in the Tower, 
and even in Elizabeth's day tourists were brought 
there to see such curious relics of the past as 
Charles Brandon's huge lance, which is still, I be- 
lieve, the admiration of our country visitors; but 
the cathedrals and churches were, as a rule, selected 
as the most suitable shrines for the reception of the 
historic antiquities. Canterbury can still show us 
the helm of the Black Prince ; Westminster the 
robes of our kings, and in old St. Paul's the very 
banner that had waved on Boswcrth field was hung 
up by Richmond himself. 

In fact, everywhere that Shakespeare turned in 
London, he saw the apparel and appurtenances of 
past ages, and it is impossible to doubt that he 
made use of his opportunities. The employment 
of lance and shield, for instance, in actual warfare, 
which is so frequent in his plays, is drawn from 
'archaeology, and not from the military accoutre- 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 249 

ments of his day ; and his general use of armour in 
battle was not a characteristic of his age, a time 
when it was rapidly disappearing before firearms. 
Again, the crest on Warwick's helmet, of which 
such a point is made in Henry the Sixth, is ab- 
solutely correct in a fifteenth-century play when 
crests were generally worn, but would not have 
been so in a play of Shakespeare's own time, when 
feathers and plumes had taken their place — a 
fashion which, as he tells us in Henry the Eighth, 
was borrowed from France. For the historical 
plays, then, we may be sure that archaeology was 
employed, and as for the others I feel certain it was 
the case also. The appearance of Jupiter on his 
eagle, thunderbolt in hand, of Juno with her pea- 
cocks, and of Iris with her many-coloured bow; 
the Amazon masque and the masque of the Five 
Worthies, may all be regarded as archaeological; 
and the vision which Posthumus sees in prison of 
Sicilius Leonatus — " an old man, attired like a 
warrior, leading an ancient matron" — is clearly so. 
Of the "Athenian dress" by which Lysander is 
distinguished from Oberon I have already spoken; 
but one of the most marked instances is in the case 
of the dress of Coriolanus, for which Shakespeare 
goes directly to Plutarch. That historian, in his 
Life of the great Roman, tells us of the oak-wreath 



25© INTENTIONS 

with which Caius Marcius was crowned, and of the 
curious kind of dress in which, according to ancient 
fashion, he had to canvass his electors ; and on both 
of these points he enters into long disquisitions, 
investigating the origin and meaning of the old 
customs. Shakespeare, in the spirit of the true 
artist, accepts the facts of the antiquarian and con- 
verts them into dramatic and picturesque effects; 
indeed the gown of humility, the " woolvish gown," 
as Shakespeare calls it, is the central note of the 
play. There are other cases I might quote, but 
this one is quite sufficient for my purpose; and it is 
evident from it at any rate that, in mounting a play 
in the accurate costume of the time, according to 
the best authorities, we are carrying out Shake- 
speare's own wishes and method. 

Even if it were not so, there is no more reason 
that we should continue any imperfections which 
may be supposed to have characterized Shake- 
speare's stage-mounting than that we should have 
Juliet played by a young man, or give up the ad- 
vantage of changeable scenery. A great work of 
dramatic art should not merely be made expressive 
of modern passion by means of the actor, but 
should be presented to us in the form most suitable 
to the modern spirit. Racine produced his Roman 
plays in Louis-Quatorze dress on a stage crowded 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 25 I 

with Spectators ; but we require different conditions 
for the enjoyment of his art. Perfect accuracy of 
detail, for the sake of perfect illusion, is necessary 
for us. What we have to see is that the details are 
not allowed to usurp the principal place. They 
must be subordinate always to the general motive 
of the play. But subordination in art does not 
mean disregard of truth; it means conversion of 
fact into effect, and the assigning to each detail its 
proper relative value. 

Les petits details d'histoire et de vie domestique (says 
Hugo) doivent etre scrupuleusement etudies et reproduits par 
le poete, mais uniquement comme des moyens d'accroitre la 
realite de I'ensemble, et de faire penetrer jusque dans les 
coins les plus obscurs de I'oeuvre cette vie generale et 
puissante au milieu de laquelle les personnages sont plus 
vrais, et les catastrophes, par consequent, plus poignantes. 
Tout doit etre subordonne a ce but. L'Homme sur le 
premier plan, le reste au fond. 

The passage is interesting as coming from the first 
great French dramatist who employed archaeology 
on the stage, and whose plays, though absolutely 
correct in detail, are known to all for their passion, 
not for their pedantry — for their life, not for their 
learning. It is true that he has made certain con- 
cessions in the case of the employment of curious or 
strange expressions. Ruy Bias talks of M. de Priego 
as " sujet du roi " instead of "noble du roi," and An- 



252 INTENTIONS 

gelo Malipieri speaks of "la croix rouge " instead of 
"la croix de gueules." But they are concessions 
made to the public, or rather to a section of it. 
"J'en offre ici toute mes excuses aux spectateurs 
intelligents," he says in a note to one of the plays; 
" esperons qu'un jour un seigneur venitien pourra 
dire tout bonnement sans peril son blason sur 
le theatre. C'est un progres qui viendra." And, 
though the description of the crest is not couched in 
accurate language, still the crest itself was accurately 
right. It may, of course, be said that the public do 
not notice these things; upon the other hand, it 
should be remembered that Art has no other aim 
but her own perfection, and proceeds simply by her 
own laws, and that the play which Hamlet describes 
as being caviare to the general is a play he highly 
praises. Besides, in England, at any rate, the public 
have undergone a transformation ; there is far more 
appreciation of beauty now than there was a few years 
ago ; and though they may not be familiar with the 
authorities and archaeological data for what is shown 
to them, still they enjoy whatever loveliness they 
look at. And this is the important thing. Better 
to take pleasure in a rose than to put its root under 
a microscope. Archaeological accuracy is merely 
a condition of illusionist stage effect; it is not its 
quality. And Lord Lytton's proposal that the 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 253 

dresses should merely be beautiful without being 
accurate is founded on a misapprehension of the na- 
ture of costume, and of its value on the stage. This 
value is twofold, picturesque and dramatic ; the for- 
mer depends on the colour of the dress, the latter on 
its design and character. But so interwoven are the 
two that, whenever in our own day historical accu- 
racy has been disregarded, and the various dresses 
in a play taken from different ages, the result has 
been that the stage has been turned into that chaos 
of costume, that caricature of the centuries, the 
Fancy Dress Ball, to the entire ruin of all dramatic 
and picturesque effect. For the dresses of one age 
do not artistically harmonize with the dresses of an- 
other ; and, as far as dramatic value goes, to confuse 
the costumes is to confuse the play. Costume is a 
growth, an evolution, and a most important, perhaps 
the most important, sign of the manners, customs, 
and mode of life of each century. The Puritan dis- 
like of colour, adornment, and grace in apparel was 
part of the great revolt of the middle classes against 
Beauty in the seventeenth century. A historian 
who disregarded it would give us a most inaccurate 
picture of the time, and a dramatist who did not avail 
himself of it would miss a most vital element in pro- 
ducing an illusionist effect. The effeminacy of dress 
that characterized the reign of Richard the Second 



254 INTENTIONS 

was a constant theme of contemporary authors. 
Shakespeare, writing two hundred years after, makes 
the King's fondness for gay apparel and foreign 
fashions a point in the play, from John of Gaunt's 
reproaches down to Richard's own speech in the 
third act on his deposition from the throne. And 
that Shakespeare examined Richard's tomb in West- 
minster Abbey seems to me certain from York's 
speech: — 

See, see. King Richard doth himself appear, 
As doth the blushing discontented sun 
From out the fiery portal of the east, 
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent 
To dim his glory. 

For we can still discern on the King's robe his 
favourite badge — the sun issuing from a cloud. In 
fact, in every age the social conditions are so ex- 
emplified in costume, that to produce a sixteenth- 
century play in fourteenth-century attire, or vice 
versa, would make the performance seem unreal 
because untrue. And, valuable as beauty of effect 
on the stage is, the highest beauty is not merely 
comparable with absolute accuracy of detail, but 
really dependent on it. To invent an entirely new 
costume is almost impossible except in burlesque or 
extravaganza, and as for combining the dress of 
different centuries into one, the experiment would 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 255 

be dangerous, and Shakespeare's opinion of the 
artistic value of such a medley may be gathered 
from his incessant satire of the Elizabethan dandies 
for imagining that they were well dressed because 
they got their doublets in Italy, their hats in Ger- 
many, and their hose in France. And it should be 
noted that the most lovely scenes that have been 
produced on our stage have been those that have 
been characterized by perfect accuracy, such as Mr. 
and Mrs. Bancroft's eighteenth century revivals at 
the Haymarket, Mr. Irving's superb production of 
Much Ado About Nothing, and Mr. Barrett's Clau- 
dian. Besides, and this is perhaps the most com- 
plete answer to Lord Lytton's theory, it must be 
remembered that neither in costume nor in dialogue 
is beauty the dramatist's primary aid at all. The 
true dramatist aims first at what is characteristic, 
and no more desires that all his personages should 
be beautifully attired than he desires that they 
should all have beautiful natures or speak beautiful 
EngHsh. The true dramatist, in fact, shows us life 
under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life. 
The Greek dress was the loveliest dress the world 
has ever seen, and the English dress of the last 
century one of the most monstrous ; yet we cannot 
costume a play by Sheridan as we would costume 
a play by Sophokles. For, as Polonius says in his 



256 INTENTIONS 

excellent lecture — a lecture to which I am glad to 
have the opportunity of expressing my obligations — 
one of the first qualities of apparel is its expressive- 
ness. And the affected style of dress in the last 
century was the natural characteristic of a society of 
affected manners and affected conversation — a char- 
acteristic which the realistic dramatist will highly 
value dowfi to the smallest detail of accuracy, and the 
materials for which he can only get from archaeology. 
But it is not enough that a dress should be 
accurate ; it must be also appropriate to the stature 
and appearance of the actor, and to his supposed 
condition, as well as to his necessary action in the 
play. In Mr. Hare's production of As You Like It 
at the St. James's Theatre, for instance, the whole 
point of Orlando's complaint that he is brought up 
like a peasant, and not like a gentleman, was 
spoiled by the gorgeousness of his dress, and the 
splendid apparel worn by the banished Duke and 
his friends was quite out of place. Mr. Lewis 
Wingfield's explanation that the sumptuary laws of 
the period necessitated their doing so, is, I am afraid, 
hardly sufficient. Outlaws, lurking in a forest and 
living by the chase, are not very likely to care 
much about ordinances of dress. They were prob- 
ably attired like Robin Hood's men, to whom, in- 
deed, they are compared in the course of the play. 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 257 

And that their dress was not that of wealthy noble- 
men may be seen by Orlando's words when he breaks 
in upon them. He mistakes them for robbers, and 
is amazed to find that they answer him in courteous 
and gentle terms. Lady Archibald Campbell's pro- 
duction, under Mr. E. W. Godwin's direction, of 
the same play in Coombe Wood was, as regards 
mounting, far more artistic. At least, it seemed so 
to me. The Duke and his companions were dressed 
in serge tunics, leathern jerkins, high boots and 
gauntlets, and wore bycocket hats and hoods. And 
as they were playing in a real forest, they found, I am 
sure, their dresses extremely convenient. To every 
character in the play was given a perfectly appro- 
priate attire, and the brown and green of their cos- 
tumes harmonized exquisitely with the ferns through 
which they wandered, the trees beneath which they 
lay, and the lovely English landscape that sur- 
rounded the Pastoral Players. The perfect natural- 
ness of the scene was due to the absolute accuracy 
and appropriateness of everything that was worn. 
Nor could archaeology have been put to a severer 
test, or come out of it more triumphantly. The 
whole production showed once for all that, unless a 
dress is archselogically correct, and artistically ap- 
propriate, it always looks unreal, unnatural, and 
theatrical in the sense of artificial. 



258 INTENTIONS 

Nor, again, is it enough that there should be ac- 
curate and appropriate costumes of beautiful col- 
ours; there must be also beauty of colour on the 
stage as a whole, and as long as the background 
is painted by one artist, and the foreground figures 
independently designed by another, there is the 
danger of a want of harmony in the scene as a 
picture. For each scene the colour-scheme should 
be settled as absolutely as for the decoration of a 
room, and the textures which it is proposed to use 
should be mixed and re-mixed in every possible 
combination, and what is discordant removed. 
Then, as regards the particular kinds of colours, 
the stage is often made too glaring, partly through 
the excessive use of hot, violent reds, and partly 
through the costumes looking too new. Shabbi- 
ness, which in modern life is merely the tendency 
of the lower orders towards tone, is not without its 
artistic value, and modern colours are often much im- 
proved by being a little faded. Blue also is too fre- 
quently used : it is not merely a dangerous colour to 
wear by gaslight, but it is really difficult in England 
to get a thoroughly good blue. The fine Chinese 
blue, which we all so much admire, takes two years 
to dye, and the English public will not wait so long 
for a colour. Peacock blue, of course, has been 
employed on the stage, notably at the Lyceum, 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 259 

with great advantage ; but all attempts at a good 
light blue, or good dark blue, which I have seen 
have been failures. The value of black is hardly 
appreciated ; it was used effectively by Mr. Irving in 
Hamlet as the central note of a composition, but as 
a tone-giving neutral its importance is not recog- 
nized. And this is curious, considering the general 
colour of the dress of a century in which, as Baude- 
laire says, " Nous celebrons tous quelque enterre- 
ment." The archaeologist of the future will prob- 
ably point to this age as a time when the beauty of 
black was understood ; but I hardly think that, as 
regards stage-mounting or house decoration, it really 
is. Its decorative value is, of course, the same as 
that of white or gold ; it can separate and har- 
monise colours. In modern plays the black frock 
coat of the hero becomes important in itself, and 
should be given a suitable background. But it 
rarely is. Indeed the only good background for a 
play in modern dress which I have ever seen was 
the dark grey and cream-white scene of the first 
act of the Princesse Georges in Mrs. Langtry's pro- 
duction. As a rule, the hero is smothered in ' bric- 
a-brac ' and palm trees, lost in the gilded abyss of 
Louis Quatorze furniture, or reduced to a mere 
midge in the midst of marqueterie; whereas the 
background should always be kept as a background, 



260 INTENTIONS 

and colour subordinated to effect. This, of course, 
can only be done when there is one single mind di- 
recting the whole production. The facts of art are 
diverse, but the essence of artistic effect is unity. 
Monarchy, Anarchy, and Republicanism may con- 
tend for the government of nations; but a theatre 
should be in the power of a cultured despot. There 
may be division of labour, but there must be no 
division of mind. Whoever understands the costume 
of an age understands of necessity its architecture 
and its surroundings also, and it is easy to see from 
the chairs of a century whether it was a century of 
crinolines or not. In fact, in art there is no special- 
ism, and a really artistic production should bear the 
impress of one master, and one master only, who 
not merely should design and arrange everything, 
but should have complete control over the way in 
which each dress is to be worn. 

Mademoiselle Mars, in the first production of 
Hernani, absolutely refused to call her lover " Mon 
Lion!" unless she was allowed to wear a little 
fashionable toque then much in vogue on the 
Boulevards ; and many young ladies on our own 
stage insist to the present day on wearing stiff 
starched petticoats under Greek dresses, to the en- 
tire ruin of all delicacy of line and fold ; but these 
wicked things should not be allowed. And there 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 261 

should be far more dress rehearsals than there are 
now. Actors such as Mr. Forbes-Robertson, Mr. 
Conway, Mr. George Alexander, and others, not to 
mention older artists, can move with ease and 
elegance in the attire of any century ; but there are 
not a few who seem dreadfully embarrassed about 
their hands if they have no side pockets, and who 
always wear their dresses as if they were costumes. 
Costumes, of course, they are to the designer; but 
dresses they should be to those that wear them. 
And it is time that a stop should be put to the 
idea, very prevalent on the stage, that the Greeks 
and Romans always went about bareheaded in the 
open air — a mistake the Elizabethan managers did 
not fall into, for they gave hoods as well as gowns 
to their Roman senators. 

More dress rehearsals would also be of value in 
explaining to the actors that there is a form of 
gesture and movement that is not merely appropri- 
ate to each style of dress, but really conditioned 
by it. The extravagant use of the arms in the 
eighteenth century, for instance, was the necessary 
result of the large hoop, and the solemn dignity of 
Burleigh owed as much to his ruff as to his 
reason. Besides, until an actor is at home in his 
dress, he is not at home in his part. 

Of the value of beautiful costume in creating an 



262 INTENTIONS 

artistic temperament in the audience, and producing 
that joy in beauty for beauty's sake without which 
the great masterpieces of art can never be under- 
stood, I will not here speak ; though it is worth 
while to notice how Shakespeare appreciated that 
side of the question in the production of his 
tragedies, acting them always by artificial light, and 
in a theatre hung with black ; but what I have tried 
to point out is that archaeology is not a pedantic 
method, but a method of artistic illusion, and that 
costume is a means of displaying character without 
description, and of producing dramatic situations 
and dramatic effects. And I think it is a pity that 
so many critics should have set themselves to at- 
tack one of the most important movements on the 
modern stage before that movement has at all 
reached its proper perfection. That it will do 
so, however, I feel as certain as that we shall re- 
quire from our dramatic critics in the future 
higher qualifications than that they can remember 
Macready or have seen Benjamin Webster; we 
shall require of them, indeed, that they cultivate a 
sense of beauty. " Pour etre plus difficile, la tache 
n'en est que plus glorieuse." And if they will not 
encourage, at least they must not oppose, a move- 
ment of which Shakespeare of all dramatists would 
have most approved, for it has the illusion of truth 



THE TRUTH OF MASKS 263 

for its method, and the illusion of beauty for its re- 
sult. Not that I agree with everything that I have 
said in this essay. There is much with which I 
entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an 
artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude 
is everything. For in art there is no such thing as 
a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose 
contradictory is also true. And just as it is only 
in art-criticism, and through it, that we can appre- 
hend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in 
art-criticism, and through it, that we can realize 
Hegel's system of contraries. The truths of meta- 
physics are the truths of masks. 



f 7 7 If ^ 

J 5 ^ 



